comScore has shared its perspective on the role that new types of searches will play in the future of search and the importance of measuring all types of search equitably across the industry.

Published: 18 Aug 2010

comScore has shared its perspective on the role that new types of searches will play in the future of search and the importance of measuring all types of search equitably across the industry.

The company is set to add a new dimension to its U.S. Core Search data known as “Explicit Core Search” alongside its standard Core Search market reporting.

comScore defines “Explicit Core Search” as user engagement with a search service with the intent to retrieve search results.

In June this year, comScore pointed out that the search market continues to evolve with new implementations of search moving beyond the traditional search box and into the context of the browsing experience as the user engages with non-search content. The company called these searches “contextual searches” because they are originated in the context of other browsing behaviour without explicit intent on the part of the user to conduct a search query.

That time comScore wrote on its blog: The recent innovation deployed by a number of search engines is to go beyond simply providing a search box along with content, but to weave their search engines into the user experience. There are at least two reasons they’re doing this. Search can be used as a powerful contextual content discovery technology. By providing search results that are highly relevant to the content being consumed by a user, properties like, MSN and Yahoo! can provide intuitive and convenient content discovery experiences. Also, by providing search results in context across their network, those sites are able to leverage the size of their audience to expose more users to their search services.

Traditionally, the industry has thought about a “search” event as a submission of a query that subsequently presents a set of results to a user. comScore’s definition of search requires that the user be presented with search results and be able to completely change or refine their search directly from the result page. This encompasses the traditional “text box” query, as is the case with the major search engines’ main search entry point.

Going forward, comScore will include in its public release of the monthly U.S. search data both the traditional Core Search and Explicit Core Search views of the market.

This, according to the company, will empower each interested stakeholder to determine which view of the market they deem most appropriate depending on the particular circumstance.

For its part, Google intends to improve search and make the web richer. The company intends to incorporate s data and semantic technology into its search service.

EyeforTravel is scheduled to conduct a session about the current state of the search landscape as part of its forthcoming Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010 event, to be held in Chicago (13-14 October). Rob Torres, Managing Director of Travel Vertical, Google Inc, and Krista Pappas, Global Director & Head of Business Development, Bing Travel at Microsoft are among the speakers scheduled to take part in this session.

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