• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 9, 2011

Taking a mass of unstructured data and making it actionable will have consequences for search marketers. How will it influence the way search engine marketers serve up ads and content for brands?

Today, search engines fail miserably when it comes to finding clear intent, according to Stefan Weitz, director of search at Microsoft Bing. Weitz, along with Mark Watkins, CEO and co-founder of Goby, kicked off the final day of the May 2011 Search Insider Summit on Saturday.

Type in a search query, click on "enter," and get a list of documents. That's how it's done today, Watkins said. Searchers want information about things, and engines have begun work toward indexing this Web of things, rather than documents.

Weitz and Watkins describe the Web as a vast collection of objects that digitally represent the virtual world. Search engines are still focused on looking at connecting links between pages and not the individual objects -- but that will change.

Search engines need to take masses of unstructured data found across the Web and make it actionable. The technology driving the engine should have the ability to identify a search intent past the initial act of the search and identify an action. For example, someone searches for a restaurant. The engine should also have the ability to identify what the user wants to book a hotel reservation. This makes search less about searching and more about doing.

Yahoo is working to make that happen. Shashi Seth, senior vice president of Search at Yahoo, made some predictions. In the next five years, the search experience will become dramatically different. Mobile search will overtake Web search, doubling in the next five years. While Web search continues to grow between 11% and 12% year-on-year, mobile search is growing at 100%. Search engines will move from indexing the Web to building content indexes -- something Yahoo has already begun to do. "No one wants to see a pair of links when the results could be more precise such as video," he said. "Pre-search and post-search will get tacked on to search."

The average time it takes to render a query in Yahoo Search Direct is about 250 milliseconds. Yahoo has found that when the search engine gives back time to the searcher, the searcher searches longer. Along with the searches, ad calls rise as well.

Yahoo is bringing indexed content to the top of search results. Through this tactic, Yahoo returns on target 30% of all its queries. By the end of the year, Seth believes Yahoo will hit 50% of all its queries.

Seth also demonstrated a local search product built with the mindset of allowing searches without entering one letter or keyword. Yahoo wants to change the focus to answers, not links. "We believe that in the next three years, more than 50% of queries will not have a link," he said. "That does have deep implications for marketers, but it's where Yahoo is headed."

At Google, that implication means pushing ads to the top of search queries. For every commercial query, the best result should be an ad, according to Matt Ackley, head of product marketing at Google.