What is it?
The world is generating electronic information at greater rates, and in a wider range of formats, than ever before. As a result of rapidly declining storage costs, it is now possible to retain more and more of this electronic data. Even more data is generated automatically by sensors and other automated processes. Cheap storage means that there is effectively no longer a barrier to prevent consumers, governments, and businesses from storing as much data as they want.
The challenge comes in locating the information you require from within this vast universe of bits and bytes. Search technology uses Boolean logic, and increasingly artificial intelligence techniques and mathematical algorithms, to pinpoint information that matches a user’s inquiry.
To date, most search technology companies have focused their efforts on searching the Internet, with Google emerging as clear market leader (accounting for around 36 percent of Web searches, with competitors licensing its technology a further 10–15 percent).
Searching the Web is challenging enough, because the information that has been indexed and is therefore available to search constitutes only a small portion of the whole (Google uses special software ‘crawlers’ to index around eight billion pages). This unindexed content, the so-called ‘deep’ or ‘dark’ Web, is estimated to be tens or even hundreds of times larger than the public Web. It is composed of dynamically generated Web pages, databases, and so forth.
The Web itself, in turn, represents just a small part of the challenge for search. Future search technology has set its sights on being able to pinpoint information on all forms of media – removable drives, individual users’ hard drives, mobile phones, and PDAs, etc. Beyond this, the intention is to be able to search within all types of media files – text, audio, video, or graphical. No wonder Google cofounder Sergey Brin described the perfect search engine as functioning like the mind of God!
To learn more about Search, download our full Foresight PDF file (
251 Kb; opens in a new window).
