Technology for the post-search world

On the road this week to attend and present at the PeopleMatter Collaborate '14 event, so today's take will be a short one, and really is not much more than a recommendation to check out this fascinating piece on Quartz titled This is what comes after search, a really interesting look at how the way we interact with the web (particularly on mobile devices) is changing.

Long story short, we don't really 'search' in the traditional sense, by typing some words into a box on Google.com, nearly as much on mobile devices as we traditionally have on personal computers, (where 'searching' was essentially the only way to find anything).

And since more and more the only thing that really matters is mobile, this change is user behavior and preferences for information discovery are having a pretty profound impact on both the major sellers or search, (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft), and the new companies that are developing technologies that are meant to deliver the next generation of 'search', where searching happens automatically, is context-aware, and is personalized for you.

Here is a excerpt from the piece on Quartz to give you an idea of what the 'post-search' world might look like:

In the old days, if you wanted to do something - navigate to the restaurant where you've got a dinner reservation - you might open a web browser and search for its address. But in the post-search world of context - in which our devices know so much about us that they can guess our intentions - your phone is already displaying a route to that restaurant, as well as traffic conditions, and how long it will take you to get there, the moment you pull your phone out of your pocket.

Manually searching for things, especially for basic information like the names of places or their locations or details about a person with which you are about to meets just seems kind of old school, kind of a 2002 way to interact with information.

Earlier this week I posted about Microsoft's Oslo project, the beginnings of their attempt at making 'search' less onerous and even unnecessary for the people in organizations that have pretty much their entire work lives tied up in Microsoft Office applications. That project, and the ones that are detailed in the Quartz piece both serve as signals of a sort, that the days of you having to figure out what it is you are looking for, then manually issuing a request to some kind of search tool to help you find the right information, and finally you figuring out which choice to make from hundreds or thousands of options are perhaps drawing to a close.

For the solution providers that will thrive in the second part of this decade, it's not about making technology that helps you find things anymore. It is about making technology that delivers the right information, in the right context, before the user even had to search.

In Soviet Russia, marketing candidate find you!

Yes I am (sadly) old enough to remember the heyday of one Yakov Smirnoff, a Russian comic popular in the 70s and 80s. Smirnoff's main schtick was to crack wise about the differences between the then-communist Russia and his adopted home in the USA in a format that came to be known as the 'Russian Reversal' and that went something like this:

In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, Party always find you!

and

In America, your work determines your marks. In Soviet Russia, Marx determines your work!

Ol' Yakov was quite a funny guy, and I couldn't help but think of him several times over that last few days when seeing numerous pieces in various contexts about how technology, robots, and increasingly sophisticated algorithms are more and more moving the needle to produce not only what we explicitly ask for and need, but also what they think we will need next.

See for example, Pre-cognitive robot knows you need help before you do, about developing robot technology that is learning how to 'see' and assess you, your actions, and your environment to anticipate your needs and react to them without or before receiving commands or direction.

And this piece, Forget Searching For Content, Content Is About to Start Searching For You, on how smarter, location-based, and fundamentally tied to your mobile device applications will more and more 'push' data, suggestions, and options to you, based on where you are, what you are doing, and who you are with, without you having to search or ask for information.

And this one, The Data Made Me Do It, about how the availability (and our increasing willingness to share) of oceans of personal data is leading to better and smarter 'anticipatory systems' that can and will provide you the answers to questions that you haven't even asked. Yet.

The key running through all these examples? None are really similar to what passes for analytics or business intelligence or even 'big data' solutions that we keep hearing so much about, and what lots of energy are focused on. Mostly, these current tools try to provide better insight and visibility into things that have already happened, not so much about what is likely to happen next, or even more advanced, to lead you with answers to questions you have not even though about yet. What has already happened is important, no doubt, but that is only a baseline or floor for beginning to understand what's next and what is not even imagined.

It's said that when really good basketball players play together on a team for awhile that they begin to understand, visualize, and anticipate each other's moves, and what they are most likely to do on the court without having to shout, point, or even make subtle eye contact with each other. Each player just knows where the other one will be, and with that knowledge and insight, can make the best decisions about what to do next, again, without even asking.

I think the same thing will eventually be said for the best technology support systems that we deploy in our workplaces. 

They won't tell us what has happened, but what is likely to happen. 

They won't be about providing report cards about the past, but rather action plans for today, (and tomorrow).

They won't remind us that we need to do a search for candidates for that Controller position that has been open for two weeks, rather they'll present us a list of qualified and interested people to contact for that VP of Marketing position that isn't technically open yet, but that signals from the internal and external social networks indicate a 87% probability the current VP is going to resign.

As Yakov the HR Director would say, in Soviet Russia, you don't look for marketing candidates - marketing candidates come looking for you.

Recipes and Jobs

This week Google introduced a new flavor (sorry about the pun), to its search engine by launching Google Recipe Search.

With Google recipe search, in addition to normal keyword-based searches ('bacon'), supplemental criteria like other ingredients on hand, desired cooking time, and total caloric value of the dish can be indicated using new tools along the left-hand sidebar. The idea being that by allowing the entry of these other critical factors, Google can present more applicable and relevant search results.  How often have you searched for a recipe only to discover that you lack a key ingredient or two, or don't have the time required to complete the cooking process for a certain dish?Blue = 'jobs', Red = 'recipes'

What powers this kind of targeted search is the use of underlying structured data that is built into the web pages that house the recipes themselves, sites like Epicurious and Food Network. These sites are coded to include information like ingredient names, cooking times, and caloric value in structured, defined, and machine readable tags - tags that Google recipe search can find and evaluate when the search is executed.

According to a Wired piece, about one percent of all Google searches are for recipes, so this new advanced recipe search capability makes sense from a user satisfaction perspective, by returning more precise matches based on a more nuanced evaluation of the user's requirements, users are connected with recipes they are more likely going to be satisfied with.

After reading about the new recipe search, I started to think about another frequent subject of Google searches - searches for jobs. We know from both anecdotal evidence and referral analysis that a large percentage of traffic to corporate career sites, job boards and job aggregators results from Google search. Heck, there is an entire cottage industry populated by consultants and companies offering organizations assistance and tools to improve their career sites' position in Google organic search. The importance of having your organization's jobs high on Google searches for your desired keywords is pretty much a given today.

So to me it stands to reason if Google has spent the time to develop a 'vertical' search for recipes, then why not one for jobs? By my crude reckoning, 'jobs' searches are even more common than recipe searches. And 'jobs' searches certainly do lend themselves to the application of more structured search criteria, like required education, salary range, technical skills, and work location among others.

Now I have no way of knowing, nor could I find any information (ironically by 'Googling'), about whether or not a vertical and structured Google search capability for 'jobs' is something Google will develop, but I also would not have thought a vertical for recipes was really all that important either.

But it would not surprise me at all to see the development of a specific 'Google Jobs' search vertical. Google built the recipe search to help users connect more directly and rapidly with the specific recipes that meet their criteria, certainly job searches could use that same kind of utility. And if indeed Google decides to do the same thing for 'jobs', then it may be your organization's time to connect with your SEO consultant/webmaster/ATS vendor - whomever it is you rely upon to keep your job listings up high on today's keyword-based organic search. Will your keyword-heavy, search optimized, micro-landing pages work in a structured search process? 

It makes sense to me that for job seekers that finding the right Google search result for their job requirements and capabilities should be as simple and precise as finding the right bacon, onion, and maple syrup recipe that I can make in under 30 minutes, having less than 500 calories.

That recipe surely exists, no?

A New HR Blog Search Tool

My friends at Halogen Software have launched a neat tool on their site, an 'HR Blog Search Engine'.

The tool does a custom Google search of the many if not all of the top HR and HR Technology Blogs for relevant content.  So if you want to know what the HR Bloggers are writing or thinking about on a particular topic, this is a tool worth checking out.

Just enter your search criteria in the 'Search' box and you are on your way.

For example a search on 'Leadership' brings the following results from some top HR Blogs like 'Great Leadership' and 'Fistful of Talent'.

And happily for me, a search on 'HR Technology' yields the following list of results:

Thanks very much to the good people at Halogen for building this neat tool for searching the HR blogosphere, and of course for including my HR Technology blog in the search results so prominently.

I will definitely make use of the search tool to help find information, insights, and when I find myself thinking, 'I know that the HR Bartender wrote about that, let me find that post again'.

If you are a blogger, or a fan of an HR Blog that you would like included in the search results, contact pr@halogensoftware.com and let the folks at Halogen know.