Search & Society: A Fundamental Shift
How humans search our digital and physical worlds is undergoing a fundamental shift. This is quite profound and changes our interactions with both worlds.
It seems ever so simple when we arrive at the search engine window, a blank spot where we enter some text and get results. Google mastered this simple yet incredibly complex feat. So much so that all the other search engines followed this premise. It became seemingly simple across all our devices. How we search however, is about to undergo some fundamental changes.
This isn’t about a battle for search engine dominance, well, it is in one aspect, but about how we interact with our digital world and the impact it has on our physical world. It is a signal of how our digital and physical worlds are becoming increasingly intertwined. And co-dependent. It underscores our sociocultural relationship with digital technologies.
As we integrate more information technologies into our world, our lumpy organic brains are going to need a lot of support, and while search engines were crucial to the success of the early internet, they will be but one part of how we will need to search in the coming decades as our digital and physical worlds merge evermore.
Why is searching so important to humans?
Searching is something our brains are always doing. Even while we sleep. When we wake up, the very first thing we do is search. The room around us, to verify or evaluate where we are. We still look out the window, even if we just checked the weather on our phone. A habit we’ve been doing since hanging around in caves.
Searching is a very important part of how we survive as a species. It is so instinctual that we don’t really think about it. Until we use a search engine or wander into a library, consult a map or look for signage on the grocery aisles. It’s why we get a bit miffed every time our local grocery store changes up the order of the aisles. Through search we learned where the popcorn should always be. Until it isn’t.
The very act of searching enables us to collect the information we need to create knowledge to survive. This is true in nature and has become true to survival in the digital world.
Our brains follow a fairly simple pattern from searching to action. We find the data, then we turn that into information. Our brain processes that information and turns it into knowledge and from there we can take actions. Sometimes individually, other times as social groups.
Why Is Search About to Fundamentally Change?
Our ability to search has always played a crucial role in emerging and unfamiliar environments. Today, the internet is one of these new and emerging environments. The internet is more familiar to us, but is still an emergent environment. In terms of the overarching history of our species on this planet, the internet and all the wondrous devices we have created to connect and engage with it, are almost everywhere on the planet, but still very new. We have in effect, created a second environment that plays a part in our survival. Something we’ve never contended with before.
Google, by far, has been the one company to focus successfully on enabling humans to search the digital world and deliver some reasonably useful information. It is quite hard to fathom just how profoundly good they’ve been at doing this. But now, even Google is struggling. Balancing the need to generate profits, while also dealing with the growing mass of utterly useless information being created. Spam, misinformation, corporate gaming and so on. Bing too, suffers this challenge. All search engines do.
Societally, because Google has done such a good job, they’re at the forefront of consumer and business frustration. Not an enviable place to be.
Google is pouring massive resources right now into fixing it’s problems with SEO junk, masses of useless AI generated content and all the other ails it is under. Google is more than aware of these issues and growing user dissatisfaction with results. My money is on Google finding some rather clever solutions.
Then along comes Generative AI with LLMs and multi-modal tools for images and videos. Microsoft moved fast to leverage its investment in OpenAI to create Copilot for it’s Bing search engine and now across its products. Subscription based search engine Kagi is also using AI. Google is working to implement Gemini across its platforms. For now, it’s all a bit messy. Not unusual for new technologies like this.
Some have said that AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT will replace search engines, that they are fast becoming a digital relic. This is not the case. They serve two very different purposes. We mostly use search engines to get to a website, for navigational purposes. We use AI search tools to turn information into knowledge snacks. To gain an insight.
If you want weather, accurate sports results for games, operating hours for a business, that sort of thing, Google is far more accurate, fast and instantly answered. AI search tools still aren’t accurate enough and can take longer. There’s a good comparative article here. Search is very much about context.
Both types of search are needed. The key is actually anticipating what type of answer someone is looking for, the context in which a search is being conducted and what actions the searcher is intending to take as a result of the information received. What neither a search engine or an AI tool can do is predict or understand how a human will turn that information into knowledge upon which they will act. And neither search tools are great at context yet.
The Changes to Search Ahead
Which all brings us to what lies ahead in how search is about to undergo its most significant changes since the arrival of search engines over 25 years ago.
When we first started using search engines, we had to be in front of a computer that had a phone line or rarely then, a dedicated sort-of high speed line. Broadband internet access as it was called, didn’t really come to mass market until the early 2000’s. Today we intermix the words WiFi, Web and internet as if they were the same thing. They are and they aren’t.
The internet is no longer a place we go to. For most of us, it is just there. Always on, accessible through a myriad of ways. Mostly through screens. But even that has changed. We can access much of what the internet can deliver through voice such as smart speakers and even on our phones.
How we interact with the digital world is fundamentally changing and this is good. It will be through the menagerie of our senses, touch, eye movements, gestures, typing, knobs and other fiddly bits. Augmented Reality (AR) glasses are gaining social acceptance, thus search must be delivered to our eyeballs and painted across most any surface. This will mean interacting with physical surfaces in new ways.
The all so familiar action of defaulting to a search engine window will not entirely be gone, but it will just be one of several ways in which we use search to navigate between the physical and digital worlds.
Adding further complexity to all this is how organisations will change the way they treat their content, the knowledge they have created and how to choose to share it with the world. There will be information considered to be the public domain or the public good and there will be degrees of information that are accessible through shared agreements between organisations, public and private groups and that which can be accessed for a price.
We already see this to varying degrees today. Paywalls, subscription models and paying for research papers.
AI tools will help to navigate this complexity. An AI agent may negotiate with another AI agent for access rights and negotiate complex multifaceted micropayments and royalty agreements without us realizing it. Personal AI agents will be more “aware” (not really the right word) of our context when we ask for information in certain situations and be able to deliver us better results for our queries and may, in some cases, be able to take action on our part. Like booking a restaurant reservation or dentists appointment.
Machines Adapting to Humans
What these changes in search tools and technologies also signals is a cultural signal requiring technology that changed us, to now change to how we collectively, as a sociocultural movement want technology to adapt to us.
As a species, we will always be searching. Not just for that age old cliché of “who am I?” But for everything we do. And we do things in very different ways based on where we are, what we are doing at any given time, who we are with and the affordances of time and space.
There is no longer one way to search the digital world. No search engine, be it Google, DuckDuckGo, Kagi, Bing, Yahoo!, can survive in the model they have today. They must begin to evolve their search technologies across voice, touch, audio and eyeballs.
The evolution of search technologies might well be considered a hard signal that as a species we have fundamentally accepted that our world is no longer just the physical one, but also a digital one and that this is our path forward. How fascinating is that?