Collateral Search and the Decline of Intention

John Battelle has famously described search engines and their collection of search queries as a database of intentions:

This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward.

The key to his description, of course, is intent.  Sally is interested in a new umbrella, so she goes on Bing to search for umbrellas.  Bob wants to know the score of the latest World Cup game, and he jumps on Google to find it.  Amanda wants to find a quick headache remedy, so she fires up her browser and tries a search on Yahoo.

People who work on search sometimes refer to this as the “lean forward” experience.  You have an objective  or an “intent” for your online journey, and you are using a search engine to achieve that objective or satisfy that intent.  As you search, you leave behind artifacts of your exploration for the search engine to analyze: the keywords you used, the results you clicked, your location, and even whether you came back to the search results quickly (a sign that the page you went to didn’t quite fit) or decided to stick with your chosen result.

The aggregation of these expressed intents provides useful insight into what the world finds interesting.  One way that Google exposes this information is through Google Trends, which shows the top search keywords and topics in real time.  Google Flu Trends takes the same approach but filters for flu-related queries only, which rivals other sources at predicting the outbreak of influenza.

But as modern life becomes increasingly digital, and more and more devices and everyday objects sprout a connection to the web, the idea of search as “intent” may start to give way to a different phenomenon: the “lean back” experience.  Or, what I would simply call “collateral search.”

Larry Page defines the perfect search engine as one that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”  Note that he doesn’t say that it understands exactly what you ask it — it understands exactly what you mean.  Take the next logical step: the perfect search engine would be able to interpret your desire for information, and make that information available to you, before you’ve even affirmatively expressed that desire.

How might a search engine be able to capture your desire for information before you expressly invoke it?  Actually, Google has already built it and deployed it across millions of web pages.  It’s called AdSense.

Think about it: you go to a website.  In the sidebar is a Google AdSense box, like this:

How are those ads triggered?  Google scans the contents of the page (in this instance, it’s a story in the New York Times about the I Can Has Cheezburger? empire) and then searches its inventory of ads for the best matches — and of course, the highest bids.  The user has not explicitly invoked this search, yet here we are with a set of search results (albeit paid) that relates to the user’s activity.

We’re seeing some other early experiments in this space, as well.  Danny Sullivan points out that Bing and Yahoo are triggering collateral searches when users click through slideshows and other links on their homepages (and he astutely argues that these sorts of “queries” should not be counted the same as intentional ones).

Prepare to see more of this “lean back” or collateral searching over the next few years.  As augmented reality takes off, you can bet that services offering “search as you look” capabilities will rise.  Geolocation is starting to mature; expect to see more products that will notify you of results based on where you are and what you’re doing.  The “Internet of Things” — where everyday objects and appliances become connected to the web  –  is imminent.  Your house will search for the best light bulb prices when your lamp goes dark, and your car will search for the best gas prices in the area as you approach the quarter-tank line.

I want to end with a word about privacy in this new paradigm, and that word is education.  The common user’s understanding of his or her digital privacy is sorely trailing their exponentially increasing use of the Web.  As discussed above, we’re entering an age where the “crumbs” we leave behind are not just the result of eating our digital daily bread, but also a consequence of our normal quotidian routines — even those we exercise offline.  Driving a car, replacing a lightbulb, pulling our phones out in a shopping mall: these are all actions that will eventually invoke automatic online activity.  If we can’t manage the privacy of information we input directly, how will we ever manage the information that we input implicitly?  While search technology may be moving away from the idea of intention, it is precisely with intention that we must prepare ourselves — and the next generation —  for this new world.