Roger Ewing's Blog

Future internet search will track your digital browsing history to present you with home buying choices before you actually search for them.

By Roger Ewing

Google Personalized Search examines your web history and assigns sites you have visited a high ranking. If you visit a particular site frequently, it will be ranked higher than sites you may not be visiting on a regular basis.  This ability is known as 2nd and 3rd Generation Search.

Amazon’s “people who bought your product also bought…” is an example of this kind of technology.  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos refers to this technology as Discovery-Based Search.

Search 4.0

Taking Amazon’s example a step further, requires a computer to get social and personal with you in the search process.

Google is pushing the search envelope.  Using your personal search history, and combining those results with search histories of people you know, as well as search histories from people you don’t know, gives Google the opportunity to finely tune your search results.  From a marketing point of view, this is powerful stuff.

The point is, Google now has the ability and the means to review your personal search history, thereby defining your individual digital stream of consciousness.

The Semantic Web

For computers to perform the tedious tasks involved in Search 4.0, images and symbols must be presented in a format that the computer can understand and evaluate.  Creating platforms where computers recognize and combine this information and then act upon it, is at the very heart of the future search process.

Computers must be capable of  processing knowledge itself.

Instead of merely recognizing text, the computer must rely on processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, resulting in more meaningful search results.

Discovery-based Search promises to revolutionize the information gathering process.

Home Search

In the near future, when you begin your online home search, you may be greeted by ads for homes tailored to your taste and preference.

Vacant homes may even be digitally staged, complete with furniture and decorations that you have previously investigated online.

Before Digital Staging

After digital staging

Digital staging photos courtesy of California Image Maker CIM.com

Some may feel discovery-based search is an invasion of privacy, while others will view this kind of search as a tremendous convenience. We can either embrace this technology, or hope it goes away.