Seeking Out the Future of Search

The future of search is the rise of intelligent data and documents. Way back in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, then a young English software developer working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, came up with an intriguing way of combining a communication protocol for retrieving content (HTTP) with a descriptive language for embedding such links into documents (HTML). Shortly thereafter, as more and more people began to create content on these new HTTP servers, it became necessary to be able to provide some kind of mechanism to find this content. Simple lists of content links worked fine when you were dealing with a few hundred documents over a few dozen nodes, but the need to create a specialized index as the web grew led to the first automation of catalogs, and by extension led to the switch from statically retrieved content to dynamically generated content. In many respects, search was the first true application built on top of the nascent World Wide Web, and it is still one of the most fundamental.