"Most people are not interested in search—they want to get things done.
The future has to be more friendly to people getting tasks done. You
don’t want to spend two weeks of evenings sitting at a keyboard and
piecing together a vacation plan. You want a system to go out and find
the answers, based on future technology that goes beyond crawling and
indexing pages."
People are getting more and more involved in defining their online world. When I say 'people', I mean the other 80% of the population that doesn't follow the gadgets and technologies, the people who are not yet blogging or building online social networks. And when I say 'involved', I mean committing time and energy to shaping their online world because there are tangible benefits to doing so.
Few will go so far as to create a personal recommendation engine based on their own tagging efforts, but it should be no surprise that people are doing this nor that they can do this. The Netflix ratings are a brilliant way to build a closer relationship between the machine language and the user who wants to find good movies. It creates a feedback loop that gives you better results the more you rate things (or at least removes items you don't want to see in your queue).
I think it was Doc Searls who said that we care for and spend time with our family, job, home and blog. But we don't necessarily do it in that order. The challenge for the next generation search engine will be to leverage all that online data we create each day to help us do the things we want to do.
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