’Search in future is going to be different’

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: It’s difficult to understand people’s surfing habits especially when the mandate is to supply them with useful information. However, Andrew Tomkins has a simple solution for judging relevant content: “Understand how to index social media content and then understand how to read the cue that tell you what the good or quality stuff is.” As the director of search research at Yahoo! Research, his mission is to develop world-class science that will deliver the next generation of businesses to the company. His research has focused on measurement, modeling, and analysis of content, communities, and users on the World Wide Web. In a recent chat with Reema Jose, he dwells on future trends in the search market. Excerpts:

What is your perception of the Indian search market? What differentiates it from the rest of the world?

In the US, internet penetration is roughly two-thirds of the population. It’s very high and getting to a point where the growth rate would not be sustainable even for one more year. In Asia, the story is very different. Internet penetration is low and may be 10%. This poses a huge growth opportunity. In India, mail and instant messaging are key things that people do. Search is very strong and growing. At Yahoo, we would have to think differently about how well to address search in a very mature market like US, or in a growing market like India.

Will new web applications like blogs and networking sites trigger new search services?

In what we call the generic and social media, there are a lot of applications that allow people to create their own data. There is a new emerging class of applications that are only a few years old, about data that potentially the rest of the world can see (for example, when you send messages to a bulletin board or when you write a blog post).

If you look at the amount of new searchable content that is being produced every day, you will find that the amount of content that comes from the social media is much more than the amount of content that is produced by traditional, professional media (like newspapers or professionally developed web sites). In traditional media, around five gigabytes per day of content is being created. Social media content already may be at least twice that.