According to the slide (pictured below) by Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of semantic Web startup Radar Networks, keyword search is diminishing in favor of new Web search functions, including social search, tagging and semantic search, among others.
It remains to be seen whether this bell curve depicted by Spivack will become a reality for keyword search, or whether users will remain loyal to this tried and true searching method.
Spivack says the bottom line is this: “Keyword search engines return haystacks, but what we really are looking for are the needles. The problem with keyword search such as Google’s approach is that only highly cited pages make it into the top results. You get a huge pile of results, but the page you want—the “needle” you are looking for—may not be highly cited by other pages and so it does not appear on the first page. This is because keyword search engines don’t understand your question, they just find pages that match the words in your question.”
Only time will tell what eventually prevails.
