By: Angel Maldonado

Information is increasingly coming to us through our peers, friends and colleagues rather than we having to search for it. This represents a fundamental disruption in the Search market where search will be replaced by user’s suggestions first and by automated algorithms secondly.

The challenge of finding information is generally dealt with search. This is the least bad solution as information continues to be discriminated when it does not match a query or some given ranking.

Information is complex and searching is simple, perfect recall through search is unreachable whether it uses legacy, semantic or probabilistic means.

The massive growth in social networks of professional or personal nature is measured by their interactions, those interactions are increasingly satisfying the needs of finding information.

Is not about search, is retrieval

More often such limited view of the information location problem is changing to a more reasonable perception of its complexities. Search represents one of the possible ways to reach information. In every case it can be retrieved through many other complementary and, with regards to suggestions not just complementary but alternative ways.

In fact, one can argue that the most commonly known search tools like Google, do not depend on search but more importantly on rankings. In Google’s case these rankings are based on determining what is popular on top of what matches a query.

The future of retrieval

The future of retrieval depends on people’s interactions rather than information itself.

If you want your products, services or information being found you bet those assets need to flow into user’s conversations in a relevant way. Why should users come to your site for your content when they are already set with the content coming to them.

Adding to this post, let me recommend you to follow (-for those of you who speak Spanish-) what Colbenson a software company focused in the retrieval market in Spain is doing with regards to connecting the Search and Social Media concepts through Said (Social-automated-interactions-demon).