Here’s a prediction for you. According to Stefan Weitz, director of Bing, search in its current form will simply cease to exist over the next few years.
“The future of search is that it won’t be search anymore. The future of search is that the box you’ve come to know and love…won’t be the constraining factor. Literally everywhere you go, every device you have, everything you touch will conduct a search, whether you know it or not,” he recently told HuffPost Technology.
Stefan feels that although search engines won’t disappear, their functionality will evolve radically, with the standard search box we know and love now set to become “as antiquated as a rotary dial phone.” His feeling is that search will become more intuitive, and that practically every possession you own will be able to conduct a search on the fly.
“Search will become more implicit and more contextual. It will be happening all the time on your behalf. There is this ability for us to stop thinking about the web as a collection of pages, which is how it was designed initially, and think about the web more as a representation of the physical world in a digital format. “
Weitz isn’t sounding the death knell for search, just suggesting that search in its current form will change sooner rather than later. That the world is on the brink of a search evolution. Of course if this evolution does indeed happen then SEO will evolve alongside it, companies still need ways to make themselves more visible to potential dentists in a search capacity.
Though SEO services will still be present, if Stefan’s vision is realised, the methods may be strikingly different to what we’re used to now. Mobile and video search, for instance, is hotly tipped to explode over the next couple of years, making optimising for these platforms an absolute must. But what other search advancements will future technology bring? We’ll have to wait and see!
This blog was written over 6 months ago and Internet Marketing and SEO is an always changing industry which means the information within this blog may be out of date. Use caution when using any methods or suggestions within it.
