The future of search could be "less search"

Source: Science and Technology Daily

The search engine market has become a new battlefield for Internet giants, and companies are competing to bet on search engines, and the dispute between "front wave" and "back wave" is becoming increasingly fierce.

In April this year, backed by Ali's Quark Search released the latest version of the App, the main camera search, calorie recognition and other functions, focusing on the education and medical fields; today's headlines in the search engine has also been accumulating power for a long time, in February, the headline search App was launched, the recent "Headline Encyclopedia" was launched, the business scope is directly benchmarked Baidu; in May, Huawei launched Petal Search overseas, which is said to be developed for replacing Google search.

China's search engine has been developed for 20 years, and as the Internet ecology has placed more emphasis on verticalization and segmentation, various platforms have begun to create a closed loop of content and traffic. The function of the search engine is constantly being redefined, and the market competition has begun to enter a new stage.

Behind the search box is a contest of ecological closed-loop competitions

In the era of mobile Internet, the phenomenon of search transition mobile terminal has become very obvious. New players have entered the market with the model of "search tool + business ecology".

Following the release of a new version by Ali Quark in April, at the end of May, Alibaba increased its size again, and alipay search business announced that it had become an independent business unit for the first time, which meant that its strategic position was further enhanced within Alipay.

According to Alipay's official data, in the past year, search has become the core traffic entrance for users to obtain Mini Program services within the Alipay terminal. The new tea brand Naixue's tea released a war report in mid-June: in two months, the search volume of its Alipay Mini Program increased by 50% per month, and the strong search traffic also promoted the number of members to soar by nearly 8 times.

However, it is worth noting that although Alipay has established a search division, the search done by Alipay is only an in-terminal search. Creating a closed loop of "content + service" has become a new landing point for Alibaba in the search business.

In this regard, Wu Jia, head of Alibaba's intelligent search business department, explained that from the PC (computer) era to the mobile era, the demand for search has never decreased, but it no longer occurs simply in search products. He said: "The era when a search box can win is over, and we must dare to define search for the future." ”

Also creating an ecological closed-loop search is today's headlines. Today's headlines, which are born from the traffic platform, have established a huge pool of their own content. "After realizing the integration of the search functions of its various content platforms, its content ecosystems can be interconnected, effective information can be directly accessed through multiple channels, and a larger content ecology can be continuously built." Yan Huaizhi, director of the Institute of Computer Network and Countermeasure Technology at Beijing Institute of Technology, said.

Huawei's entry is more like a self-help. Petal Search was launched overseas, and together with Hongmeng System and App Gallery App Store, it has become Huawei's spare tire solution to comprehensively replace "Android + Google Services". In this regard, Yan Huaizhi believes that although petal search is still immature compared to traditional search manufacturers, its biggest significance is that it has "taken a key step to completely replace Google's service applications."

Become a bidirectional channel for users to match the app

If search is the user's active "foraging", then today's overwhelming information flow is like a kind of "feeding" for users. Liu Leilei, an analyst at Ai Media Consulting, believes that with the emergence of the concept of "push", users' attention has been distracted to mobile ports with personalized recommendations such as short videos and e-commerce, and the use habits have gradually shifted from active content acquisition to passive acquisition.

In the era of mobile Internet, users often contact all kinds of Apps, and information fragmentation is inevitable between different Apps. "This 'information island' effect between mobile applications has brought a large untouchable space to the search engine's network-wide search and comprehensive search." Liu Leilei said that if search engines cannot access more App information, then the difficulty of users retrieving information will increase, and the enthusiasm for use will gradually decrease.

According to the 44th Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet Network released by the China Internet Network Information Center, although the total number of domestic search engine users continued to rise in 2019, the usage rate has declined for the second consecutive year, from 82.8% in 2017 to 81.3%.

This suggests that users' reliance on search engines is gradually declining. However, the decline in the use of search engines does not mean that people no longer need to "search", and even to some extent, the rise of vertical products proves that people have a high demand for accurate information.

In the past, search engines were in a state of being triggered by the user, and the process could be simply understood as "entering keywords and presenting results". Today, technologies such as automatic associations and real-time display of corresponding results make the search process easier, but the logic of the search behavior triggered by the user has not changed.

The biggest change is that the search process is more interactive. When users use various types of apps, app operators are also analyzing users' operational information and using intelligent technologies such as big data to accurately understand users' needs and their own characteristics to provide more personalized and professional services.

The demand information transmitted by users to the platform has become a direct path for the platform to understand the user's preferences, and the successful portrait of the user means higher business value. More accurate matching has become the best "glue" between users and the platform. This is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the resurgence of the search field at a time when information flow is popular.

In this era, the search engine has become a two-way channel between users and scenes and accurate matching information, which is not only a universal tool for users to enter a certain ecology, but also a way for apps to understand user needs. The most direct impact of this deep articulation is that the results presented after the search may affect the app itself. For example, if tens of thousands of users search for "IKEA" in Taobao's search bar, it will become one of the factors that will lead to the cooperation between Taobao and IKEA.

New technologies are making search engines different

Today's search engine market, even if it is swallowed by Baidu and other "front wave" whales, latecomers can always find a world.

Zheng Sishou, the head of Quark Search, believes that search users are more willing to pay for good products than to be too entangled in the problem of entry time sooner or later.

This view coincides with today's headline CEO Zhu Wenjia. When talking about headline search, Zhu Wenjia said: "To do a good job in search engines, first of all, technology needs technology, technology determines the search experience; secondly, content, content is the root of search; and finally the original intention, which determines whether the product can go long." The "original intention" refers to the user experience.

Liu Leilei believes: "The confidence and abuse of user habits, the emphasis on traffic, and the contempt for content and experience have made the changes in the Internet era the fuse of the decline of search engines." "Rebuilding trust is the only way for search engines to win over users.

How to provide users with a better user experience? In the view of Zhou Hongyi, CEO of 360 Group, it will not be the next search engine that subverts search. Artificial intelligence still has a lot of imagination space for the reconstruction of search engines.

Traditional search engine search results are mostly presented in the form of graphics, and now rely on artificial intelligence technology, not only to achieve voice and image search functions, but also to achieve human-computer dialogue function, Liu Leilei predicted that in the future, the search term search method "will be replaced by dialogue Q&A, video retrieval."

"Strive to create differentiated products and continuously improve the intelligent structure of search engines, as a breakthrough, we are expected to seek growth space." Yan Huaizhi said that quark search is an example of this. Quark can stand out in the search engine, in addition to relying on the Ali ecology, but also benefit from its deep cultivation in the field of AI, with "tool + ecology" circle out of the new territory, has now achieved accurate and direct search box, focusing on upgrading the photo search questions, photo translation, photo transfer documents and other AI learning tools.

Baidu creator Robin Li said that artificial intelligence technology has blurred the boundary between content push and search results, and the past "question-and-answer" search will become more "conversational". More and more searches will get answers directly, rather than giving users many links to find the right answers on their own, as in the past, and the future of search is "fewer searches".