Microsoft's Dave Coplin: Catching up with search
The concept of search is transforming as accessing information becomes ever simpler, but humans are playing catch up, writes Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer, Microsoft Advertising UK.
Search has fast become one of the most important services in our modern digital lives. Just as the arrival of electricity in our homes transformed how we lived, the capability to search through an almost infinite amount of content has completely changed how we work and play. Yet, like electricity, the potential of search is constantly evolving and often the technology and our own expectations have to play catch up.
The national grid was first conceived almost a hundred years ago, but it wasn’t until the end of WW2 that many had a domestic supply. If you have experienced living in an older home you will have “enjoyed” the gap between our previous expectations of this basic domestic utility and our needs today. I seem to spend my life hunting plug sockets; wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, I need electricity. I need to have access to the familiar charm of those three rectangular holes in my wall, not just because I have a gadget habit but because these days it’s essential just to get through the day.
In many ways I think our journey with search is similar, only it’s taken a fraction of the time for us to accelerate through our patterns of usage. Fifteen years ago, the only place that had access to the internet was an office or a library. Ten years ago, I could search at home but likely only from one location, where I had to sit in front of the home computer listening to the twisted alien sounds of the 56k modem going through its archaic handshaking ritual. Now, wherever I go, search is there with me too.
But this has solved only one half of the problem. We have the ubiquity of supply but, crucially, our actual usage of the utility has yet to evolve into something that is representative of this new opportunity. The way I use search today is but the caterpillar of the butterfly it will eventually become.
Most of us still think of search as a web page, or even just a query box, a blank empty field waiting for a few characters of text. We also still talk about search in terms of “finding”. Both of these concepts are about to be shattered.
Until recently, the way we search has consistently taken us away from the context of what we were doing. In order to search you needed to go to a ‘special’ web page (or these days an app). You left behind what you were actually doing, the document you were writing, the movie you were watching, the conversation you were having, to go to this special place, type in some information and receive the answer. Only then could you get back to what you were actually doing in the first place.
Some technical barriers are slowly being eroded. For more than a hundred years we have been tied to the fact that the only way to communicate with machines is with our fingers (I seem to spend a lot of my time showing my computer two in particular). But now things are becoming different. Today, I can access the power of search through a range of different inputs, I can talk to my Xbox to find “comedy movies from the 1980s”, I can use my phone’s camera to identify an object and, of course, I can still type.
More importantly, the concept of the search web page (or app) are fast becoming secondary to our need to make the capability of search accessible whatever your activity. At Microsoft this has been a big part of our recent strategy, as we know that search is one of the most crucial services that underpins any platform. Wherever I am in Windows 8.1, search is there with me too in the ‘charms’ that hide under the right side of my screen. Whatever I am doing on my Xbox, search is just a voice command away. On Windows phone, we even went to the extreme of creating a dedicated button to ensure it was always accessible.
And ‘access’ is entirely the point. Given the ubiquity of access and the multi-modal nature of input, I think it’s far more important for us to think about ‘accessing’ than finding. Accessing information enables us to blur the boundary between the digital and physical worlds. It makes search the service I use to reach the best the digital world has to offer and enhance what I do in the real world.
As always, though, the barriers to adoption of these new ways of using search are as much about the humans using them as the technology itself. Yes, we have made incredible technological advances, the algorithms that power search are far superior to those from even a few years ago, mostly thanks to our developments in machine learning, specifically around deep neural networks – a breakthrough inspired by the way neurons function in the brain. But, almost ironically, much of this is useless if we humans are tied to our old ways of thinking. To think of search in terms of a query box or ten blue links, to seek only to type and not to speak or show, to focus only on finding and not accessing, only serves to create a prison that prevents us from ever realising the full benefit.
The metamorphosis required is not in the technology but, in fact, in us – the human part of the equation. Only when we can transform how we think about our relationship and usage of technology will we be able to coax the butterfly from the cocoon and enjoy an entirely new future of search.
This piece originally ran in The Drum's December 2013 Search Supplement,available to buy through The Drum Store.