Wolfram Alpha, everyone’s favorite statistical search engine has seen its query traffic jump 25%, mostly due to Apple’s Siri personal assistant. Siri is one of the key features of the iPhone 4S and while initial impressions of the handset were bland, the 4S has easily become Apple’s best selling smartphone. Siri’s voice recognition has allowed Apple to partner with services like Wolfram and Yelp – giving the 4S a more native core experience.
Source: Apple Insider
Search: We’ve all seen the commercials (Below). We’ve all seen people talking to their iPhones – asking info and directions. Siri, Apple’s built in personal assistant is all the craze but has Apple, purposefully or not, put into motion the demise of Google’s search empire – or for that matter, search as we know it today? See, it all starts with how we think and use search right now – how Google, Bing and the lot have us searching now. You go to Google, you enter your query and then you’re presented with pages upon pages of results. These results are based on Google’s algorithm and advertising model, so what Google wants you to do is spend as much time as possible looking through their results. Essentially, this is the framework to Google’s search empire and their cash cow, which is printing them billions of dollars every year.
Enter Siri! When you ask your iPhone a question, it isn’t using Google search to find and provide you with the answer. It’s taking advantage of Apple’s partners, like Yelp and WolframAlpha to gather the correct information, before sending it to Siri. In essence, it’s bipassing Google all together and as Apple adds and acquires the necessary partners, its dependence on Google for search will lessen. Thanks to Siri’s success, other OEM’s are rushing to buy speech to text and voice recognition companies, Amazon being the most recent. Now, this doesn’t mean people won’t search in the classical way (as we do now) but as search evolves into voice and touch, companies will be able to move beyond Google, to provide their customers with the information they desire.
Google: This isn’t news to Google and you can bet that they’re evolving along with the trend of search - after all, they are acquiring (on average) a company a week! That’s right, Google is adding to their portfolio, a company a week. This means technologies and services that will help them advance their search offerings far beyond the current traditional sense – for Google, the future is a combination or Local+Social+Search.
Future: The process of searching for information, is going through a renaissance at the moment and while we don’t know how far along it will advance (voice, touch, vision), we do know that its current form will go through some hard growing pains. Traditional search companies like Google and Microsoft will have to up their game, in order to stay in the game. For me, the most exciting aspect of this ever evolving tech, is the way we will interact with our countless digital devices.