According to Gord Hotchkiss, CEO and president of Enquiro, although unseen changes to the algorithms and ad platforms were still the status quo in search, this year the most drastic changes were aimed directly at the users. And while the industry will continue to evolve, the shifts in 2008 will be much less noticeable.

During his keynote speech at MediaPost's Search Insider Summit, Hotchkiss gave predictions for where search was headed--bolstered by insight from search veterans like Jakob Nielsen and Google's Marissa Mayer as shared with him at a recent Enquiro seminar.

"The single biggest challenge facing everyone in the search game is disambiguation," Hotchkiss said. The engines and search marketers have to work hard to understand what a user really means when they enter their queries, so that they can deliver the most relevant organic and paid results. To that end, much of the focus on improving search in the next three years will be on centered on better using searcher intention to shape the results.

Allowing users to sign in and customize their searches--and then use that history to tailor future results--seems like a logical way of understanding their intentions, as would the ability to leverage collective search and social media data. But while those kinds of features took precedence this year, Hotchkiss said that search personalization and the influence of the "social graph" won't have as great an impact on the user experience moving forward. Instead, the focus will be on tools like Yahoo's Search Assist that use predictive text to help users refine their queries--and give the engines a better chance of returning more relevant results.

Reducing the ambiguity of the search experience will also change search overall--including success metrics and search patterns. Hotchkiss said that Yahoo's Search Assist had an immediate impact on the patterns of queries, effectively moving more searches into the long tail and leveling the playing field between small and large advertisers. "As results become more useful, searchers may not even go beyond the search page," Hotchkiss said, "so we may have to rethink using the click as the only measure of success."

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