This time of year everybody likes to start making predictions about where industries are heading. This is especially true in the search industry. My guess is that we will see quite a few pieces this month regarding where search is going in 2010. These can make for entertaining reads and get the mind going with regards to how we are going to have to plan for an ever-changing future of search engine marketing.

Microsoft says that reference search sessions average over 9 minutes in length and over 6 queries per session before the user finds what they are looking for. With that in mind, the company is highlighting how Bing handles reference material.

There is clearly great emphasis placed on Wikipedia results, and I have to admit that as I began to read Microsoft’s explanation, I was starting to think, "Why not just cut out the middle man and search Wikipedia?"

The company says things like:

Ask.com has released a database of 300 million Q&A pairs available to users in the US and the UK.

"Delivering the best answers though innovations in semantic search technology is the direction in which the search industry is headed, and Ask is best-placed to lead the industry in this regard given our database of hundreds of millions of questions, and our core search technologies," said Scott Kim, Ask.com’s EVP of Technology. 

Remember Ask? You know, the search engine with the Butler. While the company doesn’t get brought up in the discussion as much as it once did, it has not surrendered to Google and it’s other competitors just yet.

Ask has now announced some advances in its semantic search technology. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of Semantic Search, Wikipedia explains it:

It’s not the key to flying cars, and perhaps we also can’t count on it to provide clean energy or miracle cures.  The development of semantic search is of huge importance to search companies, advertisers, and the average user, however, so a session of the same name addressed the question of "Semantic Search: How Will it Change Our Lives?"

You’ve probably picked up that this week is about SES San Jose from Dana and Ashley’s “15 Things Not to Miss at SES San Jose” followed by Jessica’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” post.  I am also headed out to sunny California next month.

Hakia, a semantic search engine, launched a social network of sorts back in October. The purpose of the network was to allow users to connect with others who typed in the same query.

While I’ve always wondered why you’d want to do that unless a search engine’s results were lacking, I figured it was about time to see how that idea was going after almost three months.

Pluses:

Most of you know that my job focuses on IBM’s OmniFind enterprise search and text analytics products. And I’ve written before about semantic search—I’ve even written about what semantic search isn’t. I keep talking about it because semantic search is probably the easiest to understand application of text analytics.

Every day, we bring you news of the latest comings and goings in the search engine industry.  The names Google and Yahoo come up a lot . . . Xerox, not so much.  But it’s that last company that is preparing a semantics-based search engine.