Microsoft Research recently revealed a new interface, called SearchBar, for tracking Complex Searches. It’s pretty cool. The video is a must see for anyone interested in next-generation search. And the PDF is solid detail well worth the read. [You might also want to see their other Search UI innovations.]

The new SearchBar addresses a lot of the needs I’ve been talking about for Complex Searches, although with some slight variations and a few key missing ingredients, which I’ll be talking about soon. (Hint: it’s not quite a user-centric Search solution.)

What’s great about SearchBar is how thoroughly Microsoft has investigated the value of managing Complex Searches explicitly. Although the simplicity of the Google-style keyword search has empowered a generation of people to find what they need online, it essentially breaks down for Searches that pass a certain threshold of complexity. Searches that take us to multiple search providers and last more than a few minutes, even days or weeks, are essentially managed in whatever ad-hoc way we can find: we keep it in our heads, open in new tabs, cut & paste into Word, bookmark, print to PDF, whatever works.

One of the hard questions we’ve been facing at SwitchBook is how can we simplify that complexity enough so Mom & Grandma will be able to use our software. This is particularly challenging in light of data from Jacob Neilson showing that for a shockingly high percentage of people, just getting to Google is hard. Read that again. In a recent study, 24% of “above average” Internet users failed to reach Google despite a stated desire to do so.

That seems crazy to those of us who earn our living online in some fashion, but this is the crazy truth of the mainstream Internet user. These are the folks who turn a blogosphere buzz into a $200 million acquisition or billion dollar IPO. Folks need it simple. No, even simpler than that. Nope. Think again. EVEN SIMPLER. 24% couldn’t get to Google. Amazing.

So, we can build a solution for Complex Searches. We can provide software with a great interface that does all sorts of amazing things. But how, oh how, do we remove the complexity so that the average Grandma can use it?

Well, that’s the $640 million question. I like the work Microsoft has done so far. Much better than anything from Google in this area. Even better, they published the results of their user testing. It is excellent validation that smarter tools improve search efficiency for Complex Search. Read the paper when you get a chance.

It is truly groundbreaking research, even if the technology is straightforward. I look forward to it translating to groundbreaking consumer education. After all, it was only a few years ago that Internet email and Microsoft Word seemed impossibly complex for Mom & Grandma. Today, we’ve both simplified the tools and educated users enough for both of those applications to pass into mainstream use. As far as I’m concerned, every dollar Microsoft spends educating the public about the value of Complex Search tools, the easier it will be for people to understand the SwitchBook value proposition.

Over at On the Pod, Duncan Riley hosts a rambling but intriguing chat about APML and its relationship with the latest Social Network developments:

Ashley Angell, Chris Saad (Faraday Media) and Jon Cianciullo (Cluztr) join Duncan Riley to discuss APML, OpenAuth, OpenSocial and how we are moving towards open data sharing.

Even with the audio problems, it is worth listening to the whole bit. There is a great, concise analysis of the real value and limitations of OpenSocial, but my ears perked up especially when Chris endorses VRM and, more importantly, connects the success of APML to its role in providing user control over Attention data.

I have said several times that Attention efforts are missing the big win, digerati conversations about the “Attention Economy” notwithstanding. Getting your attention without providing value is annoying. We will soon see the impact of that as people begin to react to Facebook’s latest innovations in advertising.

It sounds redundant to say it, but the real goal for people is to realize our Intentions. That’s what “intention” means. We put our energy and will into realizing our intentions. Attention just happens to be how we filter out the signal from the noise. It does not inherently translate to value for anyone. In fact, distracting your attention is a key skill of politicians, magicians, and con-men everywhere. So, it isn’t about “Attention.” It’s about “Intention.”

The opportunity, then, for service providers and software vendors is to provide tools for individuals to manage their Intention. Solve that while facilitating vendors’ goals–because many, but not all, Intention activities are directly monetizable in a transaction–and you have a service or product that can generate serious value for everyone involved.

That’s the promise of VRM.

As I’ve mentioned before, VRM–or Vendor Relationship Management–is at the core of SwitchBook’s approach to tools for Complex Search. Our involvement in that effort has transformed how we think about Search, advertising, and online marketplaces.

VRM’s mandate is straightforward: Enable buyers and sellers to build mutually beneficial relationships. The vast majority of online buyer/seller relationships include Complex Searches prior to a transaction and the bigger the transaction amount, the more effort that goes into the Search and therefore, the more important and useful the tools provided to individuals. We see a direct link between providing people control over their online Searches and enabling them to have richer, more rewarding relationships with vendors. To us that means simplifying how people realize their Intentions online by connecting them with the right resources more efficiently and more credibly.

What is intriguing about the podcast is the endorsement of VRM and the related commitment to empowering user choice through APML tools. Whatever words we use to describe it–”Attention” or “Intention”–increased user control is definitely part of the solution.

As Attention becomes more and more shaped to be responsive to user choice rather than a smart database of people’s online behavior, and the more it empowers both explicit expressions of interest and the implicit meaning we can glean from people’s clickstreams, the closer Attention comes to Intention.

To be fair, much of what we are doing with Intention incorporates a lot of Attention data. So, while there are still some key distinctions, it is good to see APML folks talking about VRM in a way that suggests a fruitful convergence is not so far away.

Much laughter and thanks to Cory Doctorow for a send up of the Googlefuture, Scroogled. I’ll add a subtitle: “Learning to love Google nation.”

Cory’s tale noir makes it crystal clear why Search needs VRM-style solutions to deal with user control of query and clickstream data. Google isn’t about to let you fully edit or delete your unsavory history any time soon (what a boon that they now promise to anonymize after 18 months). Other efforts, like APML, mostly seem to be beautiful ways to aggregate personal data from everywhere you go and everything you do online… with minimal talk about how you control access to it. John Batelle‘s Data Bill of Rights and similar efforts show promise, but none specifically address how we resolve Search as digital trail of inherently privacy-busting data. Even within the Identity and VRM communities, there has been precious little talk about how to put users in control of their relationships with Search providers, which is to say VRM for Search.

SwitchBook is still essentially in stealth mode, which means I won’t yet say much, except that we think our approach to Search addresses some of these problems, offering a privacy-savvy framework for user-centric Search. We can’t make Google give up your data, but we can create new ways to Search the web that fundamentally reshape how your Search history and results are managed. There’s a reason I’m a big supporter of VRM and it has everything to do with putting the user in control of where and how they Search, while leveraging an incredibly rich personal datastore as they do so.

Nancy Gohring at ComputerWorld reports:

Managers waste hours every day looking for information that often turns out to be useless, according to a report from consulting firm Accenture Ltd.In a survey of 1,000 middle managers at large companies in the U.S. and U.K., Accenture found that managers spend as much as two hours a day searching for information — and more than half of the data they find has no value to them.

That’s one hour, every day, wasted by middle managers because their searches are ineffective. What a mess.

Information is often more difficult to find because it’s scattered, respondents said. Fifty-seven percent of those polled said that having to go to numerous sources to collect information makes managing data difficult. On average, the managers said they go to three different sources to find certain types of information….

Managers often face additional challenges because they don’t save important data in a collaborative place. The majority of the managers surveyed said they store their most valuable information on their computers or in individual e-mail accounts, where others can’t access it, Accenture said. Only 16% of managers said they store valuable data in a collaborative workspace, like an intranet portal.

Just under half — 42% — of those surveyed said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week.

Of all the managers surveyed, IT workers are the least likely to say the information they find is valuable, and they spend the most time trying to find it. They dedicate nearly 30% of their time trying to find information.

Until companies streamline the way that workers store data, information will continue to be a burden to knowledge workers, Accenture said.

I agree. I’ll add that we also need to streamline the way knowledge workers discover and track information when searching.

The paradigm for search today is built around stimulus-response queries at search engines, but most users engage in search as part of a larger inquiry with an end goal that is more complex and subtle than the intermediate search queries.

Think about online search for competive analysis, market research, or due diligence. Or it could be more consumer-centric, like buying a home, planning a vacation or looking for a job. For each of these searches the user will visit multiple, different search providers, and they will–more or less successfully–keep track of results across many many different websites. Some people keep track in their heads. Others use bookmarks or just keep tabs open or even print web pages out and put them in manilla folders.

There are a few tools out there helping with this: Onfolio, Google Notebook, ScrapBook, and Kaboodle. Of these, none seem to recognize the fact that the user is actively searching.
If you know of any others in this space, please chime in. Or if you’ve tried any of those listed, let me know how you like them. I’d love to hear about what’s out there and what people think.

This is the problem we are working on at SwitchBook, but I’m sure there are more players out there than I’ve discovered so far.

Effective, distributed, and automated third-party Identity systems will touch and change just about everything on the Internet. (Tip of the hat to Kim Cameron for the proposal and work behind that link.)

For the last few months I’ve been exploring how VRM and Complex Search might be augmented with an Internet Identity Meta-System (IIM). The first idea was simple: provide special product offers or search results based on identity. If you are a member of a particular affinity group, it would be useful to target promotions and advertisements automagically.

For those who don’t know how IIM works, think about it as third-party authentication where the second party need never see your secret information.

Instead of giving your Social Security Number (SSN) to a potential lender so they can check your credit rating, IIM uses a form of token-passing to let you authenticate directly with the credit bureau (who already knows your SSN), who then tells the lender your credit rating.

Make sense? Essentially, you and the vendor agree to use IIM and swap tokens. You go to the credit bureau with that token, and authenticate yourself directly. The vendor goes to the credit bureau with their token and gets your credit score. Result: vendor has the credit report and never required your SSN, name, or other “secret information” that might enable identity theft by an unscrupulous lender or middleman. [Note: this isn’t quite how it works, but it correct enough for the explanation.] In a fully realized IIM, all of these tokens are created and exchanged magically and nearly invisibly, just as SSL today makes it trivial for users to establish secure communication links between web browsers and servers without really paying attention to certificates.

The nice thing about a ubiquitous and inexpensive IIM is that it will make it possible for practically anyone to host an identity service. Any entity with a meaningful relationship with you could validate that relationship instantly. The result for Complex Search and VRM: relationships that support and improve your search and/or shopping experience.

If you are a million-miler at United Airlines, I’m sure there are hundreds of vendors who would like to offer you special promotions and discounts. Ditto for AAA and AARP membership, or even military affiliation. IIM integrated into VRM and/or Complex Search makes that possible, even simple.

The more I thought about it, the more possibilities emerged. In particular, distributed, secure Identity allows for a new kind of reputation network.

Equifax and other credit bureaus already offer digitally empowered reputation services. Lenders transmit a shared secret (the individual’s social security number or SSN) to Equifax. In return, Equifax gives the lender a real-world financial reputation report based on the identity associated with that SSN.

eBay, Digg, and Technoratti use similar reputational effects to help people buy things and find things.

It’s easy to see reputation being a factor in VRM as well, including countering the concerns some people have raised about “window shopping” the VRM system.

To refresh, VRM allows customers to specify their needs in a sort of digital RFP, send that RFP to a distributed marketplace, and vendors reply with bids to fulfill those needs. But what if the customer isn’t really going to buy anything? What if they are just window shopping? Isn’t that a violation of the intent of the system?

Actually, it can be both a feature and an opportunity. It’s a feature because people should be able to window shop. If I’m planning a vacation, I want to be able to evaluate my options before committing to a purchase (one reason I rarely use any of the priceline buying models). Perhaps I won’t be offered binding contracts when “window shopping”, but I should be able to browse, to see what discounts might be offered for my various affiliations or because of the timing of the purchase, even when I’m not yet ready to buy.

On the other hand, if people claim they are in the market to buy and don’t, that is an abuse of the system. The answer: a reputation network.

A reputation could be integrated with the marketplace, as it is at eBay. Or there could be distributed reputation management, like lenders have with credit bureaus: Markets would inform the Reputation firms about ratings and disputes and Reputation firms would aggregate reputation over multiple markets. In fact, there is no inherent reason that people couldn’t use their reputation at eBay to endorse VRM transactions at other markets, as long as we have an interoperable IIM in place. eBay then makes money by selling access to that reputation, just as the AARP might make money validating the identity of its membership, as it does today.

In short, IIM is an approach to identity that scales with the Internet, without centralized bottlenecks, with all the value and security one requires when checking identity. On top of the underlying autonomy and anonymity of the Internet, there will emerge a parallel fabric of self-organizing accountability and identity. The value and potential uses of such a fabric are just beginning to be defined and understood.

Consider how such a system might allow a reinvention of blacklist/whitelist approaches to SPAM. Or how it might protect children from sexual predators. Or even provide seemless, anonymous access to semi-restricted public services like disaster relief programs.
There’s still a lot of work to do. Once we get the infrastructure fully defined, toolmakers will need to integrate it into clients and developers will need to build services that utilize it. But once the pieces start clicking into place, it should be interesting to say the least.

If you can make it to the Internet Identity Workshop this next week, please say hi. I’m looking forward to meeting folks engaged in this space. I’m also looking forward to learning more about the current state of development, especially how current approaches inter-operate.

What do you get when you turn proprietary data silos inside out?

Users in control.

Doc Searls has been advocating VRM for a while (here too). What’s nice about his thinking — in addition to the open source/open standards approach we’d expect from a senior editor at the Linux Journal — is that he’s working the problem through the entire technological spectrum:

I don’t think VRM should be confined to a browser, either. I think this is something that should work through a cell phone, a card, or any other device or representation that works for the individual.

Not only are the vendor’s silos being turned inside out, so are the technology and network providers’.

My mindset has been stuck in the browser, perhaps with an accompanying helper application that does nice things for users, but still basically software on a personal computer. At the core, SwitchBook’s innovation is useful in larger contexts, but it won’t start out that way. Our strategy in simple:

1. Make it work with current search habits.
2. Augment IE and Firefox.
3. Expand to other OSes and browsers as quickly as possible.
4. Push the underlying API and data format as an open standard.
5. Open the tool for customization as widely as possible.
6. Open source the code for “built-in” customization

But are we going to take the time now to make sure it works in cell phones or datacards or iPods or anything other than a computer? There just isn’t enough bandwidth for that in a bootstrapping startup.

Fortunately, Doc’s VRM work as a Fellow at the Berkman Center gives him the freedom to invest in a solution of that breadth. A VRM solution that is bigger than any one company, technology, platform, or medium. Say goodbye to the silos.

It has also given me a fresh way to think about Complex Search. Much of VRM — as I understand it — is designed to be automagic. Specify your needs, receive bids from selected/qualified vendors using a tool that makes it easy to manage those relationships. But before one can specify needs, most people need to spend time discovering their needs. For all but the simplest purchases, that’s a Complex Search.

For example, take Doc’s latest VRM “Gesture”

I want a phone that is GSM-based (so it works overseas as well as in the U.S.), works across as much of the U.S. and Canada as possible (Verizon has been a disappointment in this respect), has a GPS, and has an easy-to-use UI. I don’t care about PDA functions, ringtones (I like the old Western Electric bell ring, though), or camera functions. I like keys that are easy to read and use, and an address book that’s easy to synchronize with a computer. It would be nice, for personal reasons (I work for Linux Journal), if it ran on Linux. I’d rather it not (for the same reason) run on Windows. Mostly I just want it to be a good GSM phone with a GPS. And I’m willing to let the GPS function slide, just to get a good phone.

That’s a mouthful. Doc is famous enough in the blogoverse to get feedback without the VRM infrastructure. He may not have a vendor make an offer directly (although a smart vendor would seriously consider sponsoring Doc), but he’ll probably get enough direction from peers to narrow down his vendor choices. With a fully operating VRM, the fulfilment side of that gesture will be streamlined and automated so that any vendor who wants to can cost-effectively make Doc a competitive offer, perhaps even a bundled package that leverages their unique value-add. That will take a lot of work, but the potential value to everyone in the transaction is clear.

Compare that to the broad, politicized, unfocused brush strokes of the AttentionTrust and you can see why I think the AttentionTrust goals are still too blurry and ambiguous to generate much success. VRM is working with Intention. It is highly focused. Its output is clear. The benefit to users and vendors is evident. AttentionTrust is stuck thinking about everything, all the time, and only online, then mashing that into some anonymized goulash from which magic is supposed to emerge. Bah humbug. I’ll believe it when I see it.

I think Doc is on to something, though. The Internet so radically drops the costs of so many different modes of communication, it will continue to restructure our society for another couple of decades, at least. Most of the success to date has been based on one-to-many marketplaces, such as Amazon or many-<aggregated-as-one>-to-many marketplaces such as eBay. VRM lets us create inverted “many-to-one” markets. Markets of one. Make your gesture, create a market. That’s powerful.

And yet, Doc’s gesture — as every request for bids must — also contains a treasure trove in the form of Doc’s requirements, a wealth of needs Doc learned the hard way. He’s a power user with heavy demands and he pushes technology to its limits. He is fed up with his current options and, having experimented enough, he knows just what wants. But he’s lucky to have that experience. Most people have no idea what the deciding factors could or should be for the products they want to buy. (Can you say megapixel?) Doc is anything but a typical consumer.

Consider what it was like when the web started taking off in 1994/5/6. At that time, I was out selling Internet marketing services and helping companies figure out what to do online. Overwhelmingly, time and again, smart, capable, professional people asked “How much does a website cost?” Well, what kind of website do you want? Their question was inherently non-sensical, but people didn’t understand that yet.

First, you have to figure out what you want, then, and only then, can you send out an RFP to get bids on it. Sure, you scale your RFP based on what your budget is — and unless you have deep pockets, it pays to be prudent in what you include in your request — but at the end of the day, only a detailed specification provides enough direction for vendors to submit a bid. The result of these conversations was often a small strategy and/or requirements engineering contract to distill their needs into just such an RFP.

So how does that work with VRM? How do people develop enough expertise and understanding of their needs so they can present a request like Docs? How does VRM work for regular folk?

In short, they search. They explore. They learn.

From friends. By reading reviews. Going to various manufacturer’s and vendor’s websites. By learning from people like Doc, either through blogs, reviews at CNET or ThisNext, pricing at PriceGrabber, Google, or through direct conversations. By trying out products. Even from advertising and retail stores. I happened to learn about Verizon’s data services in the Verizon store. Imagine that.

This is Complex Search. People aren’t going to rely on any one vendor or reference point, unless they have an absolutely trusted guide like a brother or daughter or college roommate to point them in the right direction. They are going to check out different sources, browse multiple websites, collate and corollate a lot of information from a lot of different places. Then, after they have searched and narrowed their needs down to the details, they can put it in the form of a digital RFP and see the power of VRM kick in. Zing! A Market of One.

VRM is still evolving. Questions and answers of many varieties must work their way through the community, from people’s and companies’ needs to draft technological frameworks, APIs, protocols, and working code. Good stuff.

Somewhere in there, I’m confident Complex Search will meet VRM and lots of real value will be created for people, vendors, and innovators alike.

Doc will be at the Identity Workshop in early December to discuss VRM and Identity with all comers. It should be a great opportunity to figure out where VRM is headed and how we can contribute. I hope you can make it.

In a conversation about the potential market lock-in of Google at Abe Burmeister’s blog, Dave Chiu introduced me to a great presentation Seth Godin made to Google early in 2006, explaining that it was marketing, and not technology, that made Google the market leader. I couldn’t agree more, even though most of my technology friends will swear it was all about the quality of PageRank.

Tests show that when Yahoo! & Google results are formatted identically, users can’t tell the difference. And yet, Google matters to people. They matter in a deeply personal way. They have created a powerhouse brand because better technology gave them an opportunity to market to the masses and that marketing worked.

Seth puts this in his framework of remarkable stories. His bestselling books The Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars discuss this in much greater detail, with lots of anecdotes, examples, and advice on how to improve marketing through remarkable stories. Good stuff.

What he doesn’t talk about is how you create the right stories to tell. He misses that point in his books as well. But that’s ok. Stories are powerful marketing tools. That’s an important enough message by itself. In the presentation he also does a great job pointing out the anticipatory and experiential value of a brand–that value people get just because they buy the brand, independent of the actual value of the product. The driver for this type of value is story, especially when the brand connects with people’s identity in profound ways.

He then goes on to outline his view of Fashion/Permission marketing that is uniquely enabled by the Internet as a one-to-one disintermediated medium. He exhorts Google to create a permission tool that gets users to invite Google into a deeper relationship, one that gives Google more context and more details about what users are really looking for. In other words, leveraging the brand to enhance the technology by meeting users needs in a more meaningful way, which of course will only enhance the brand further. Great stuff. Note to Google: possible areas for development: VRM and Complex Search.

It is worth watching, if only to see the advice one of the hottest minds in marketing gives to the most influention Internet company on the planet.

Curiously, Seth missed the opportunity to explain to Google that their haphazard development strategy is steering them, inexorably, away from the branding that made them the market leader: the promise of making the Internet simple.

Last week, Seth Godin wrote about the critical role trust plays in our market relationships.

And the upside? The upside is that individuals (and organizations) that don’t stoop, that manage to figure out how to have influence without trying to profit from it, those brands are the ones that will last, that will thrive and that will bring the rarest commodity–trust–to the table.

Trust is an absolutely essential ingredient when we buy. We don’t part with hard earned dollars unless we convince ourselves the result will be worth it. We count on the salesman or the manufacturer to deliver real value. We trust their promises and fork over the cash.

Sure, Caveat Emptor, buyer beware. But companies that violate our trust once lose our business forever. In today’s markets there is so much choice, so many options, that once trust is gone, people are free to move on to another offer, and they do.

This is nothing new. Trust has always been critical. The information age changes the pace and volume of information, but not the criticality of trust. It seems to me that hundreds of years ago a single piece of information–”The King is dead.”–could change the course of a battle and turn the tide of a war. Today, a single piece of information is rarely so valuable. Instead, we assimilate, analyze, and respond to vast torrents of information. Diving into the Internet is like swimming in an ocean; daily RSS feeds from the Blogoverse are like drinking from a fire hose. It isn’t about any particular drop of water, it is about whether or not you can consume and respond quickly and intelligently enough to keep yourself from drowning.

What remains the same today and yesterday is the critical nature of how much trust you place in your sources of information. If news about the departed monarch of yesteryear arrived from the mouth of the town drunk, it wasn’t believed. If today’s assertions of male enhancement and unimagined wealth are delivered in attention assaulting SPAM, they too deserve little notice. In both worlds, trust moderates the flow of information. Without a source or a guide we can trust, no information can be depended on.

Sometimes that trusted guide is someone you know. Sometimes it is a brand that you’ve come to rely upon. Or perhaps it is someone referred to you by someone else.

Yet, when it matters, we rarely trust just one source, no matter how trustworthy. Our doctors tell us to get a second opinion. Buyers seek multiple bids. Journalists are trained to double check their facts. It is a matter of due course to seek out alternative perspectives to transform a one dimensional recommendation into a three dimensional panorama with scope and breadth of multiple experiences and views. Even at Amazon, we rarely read just one review; we want a wealth of perspectives so we can paint a richer picture of the product in question.

With the Internet, we regularly review and incorporate multiple sources in our decision making. We double check the prices at Expedia and Travelocity at Orbitz or United.com. We check online reviews and competitive offers from multiple sources for just about any item we can buy, from cars to computers to movies. We aren’t limited to any particular silo of information. We mix and match until we have convinced ourselves that we understand well enough to make a decision. This is the oceanic torrent of diverse information we sift through to discover truth.

This is complex search. We browse the web, using multiple search providers and track results across many many destination websites. It isn’t about the quality of any single search result, it is about managing the aggregate results from multiple services across the web.

When we search for a house, we don’t take the MLS listing at face value, we also check Zillow.com and want to learn about schools, crime, traffic, smog, and public transportation in the neighborhood. When looking for a job, we don’t just trust Monster.com or CareerBuilder.com, we also visit the company’s web page, scan Google and Technorati for buzz, and may even check out eTrade or Hoover’s for more in-depth financial data. We use the Internet to compile an aggregate view of our search target, a view that combines the perspectives of many different sources of varying levels of trust. The end result is a composite that we can trust because it represents a coherent representation of a broad range of diverse data, selected using our own judgment. We trust it more because it isn’t sole source, because we did the legwork, because we own it emotionally.

And yet, of the search solutions available today, none make it easy to manage this type of inherently complex process of double-checking, comparing, and seeking second, third and fourth opinions. What you type in at Expedia has to be re-typed at CheapTickets and United and Travelocity, and the results are often hard to retain for later comparison. What you find on eBay is isolated from the results at Amazon and shipping, handling, & taxes may be hidden until you proceed to checkout; even shopping sites like NexTag, TheFind, and ThisNext don’t make it easy to mix & match and compare multiple products fully priced from multiple merchants. Even Google and Yahoo! and MSN leave vast swaths of the Internet outside of their search database, commonly known as “The Dark Web.” Today’s search is a vast array of isolated islands, each offering a glimpse into their private database, their own private silo. But users don’t live in silos, they skip across the net from island to island, saving to bookmarks, printing to PDFs, opening links in new tabs and windows, even cutting & pasting into Word, trying to keep track of their journey. It’s a mess.

What we need is a tool or a system that lets us coordinate complex searches across the ‘net, using any search provider we want–indeed using any query-driven web service–all seamlessly integrated into a single interface and repository stored in the user context. We need the user to be in charge of their search, no matter where it might lead, how it might evolve, and what information is uncovered. We don’t need to be bound to any particular vendor, or isolated in any particular silo. We do need to be able to expand the search to include new search providers and to capture unforeseen data. And its needs to be both easy and powerful. And it all needs to work without interrupting, distracting, or confusing users.

That’s what we are working on at SwitchBook. Over the course of the next few months, I’ll be exploring what Complex Search means, highlighting how current and emerging tools succeed and fail to meet this need. Hopefully you’ll find it as compelling a problem as I do and will take a moment to share your thoughts on how we can shift the search world from the simple query-response of the Google era to an interconnected system of search technologies that empower users to resolve truly complex searches simply, quickly, and effectively. When we can do that, we can create a system that is accessible enough, flexible enough, and transparent enough for every user to trust.

Google and Yahoo! are part of a thriving industry that provides billions of dollars in real value. Yet in The Search John Batelle and Udi Manber suggest that Search is only about 5% invented. Bill Gross, inventor of the Pay-Per-Click business model (among other accomplishments), follows that thinking, saying in an interview with John Battelle:

I do think pure search sites will continue to prosper, but I also think that there will be many new kinds of specialized search that continue to surprise us. I just made up a little table of the searches I do per day over the last 20 years, looking at some key milestones, like when I started using email heavily, and then when Netscape took off, and then when the first search engine companies went public, and then again when new tools came out, like X1 for searching email, iTunes for searching music, my TomTom for searching for locations.

In other words, current Search solutions do ok, but there is lots of room for innovation. In February, I started working on SwitchBook Software to address a core problem that seems to have been left out of the conversation, called “Complex Search.” (My apologies… the website doesn’t have much there at the time I wrote this blog entry.)

In a sentence, Complex Searches require more than a single result to resolve.

Simple Searches—like finding how to replace the toner in your printer—can resolve quickly once an appropriate online resource is found. When you find the instructions, you are done Searching.

In contrast, Complex Searches—like finding a job or buying a home—require multiple queries, using multiple Search Providers, to discover various aspects of the “result” at multiple final destinations, often Searching for fundamentally different things at different parts of the Search.

For example, when Searching for a home one might begin by asking “What homes are available that fit my criteria?” Then, for each candidate home you find: Is it a good price? What’s crime like in that neighborhood? What kind of financing can I get? What are the schools like? Complex Searches require answering complicated, evolving questions by exploring the web through various Search Providers and websites. Current tools make this difficult.

As Bill Gross’s comments suggest, users today will use many different Search engines to resolve these types of questions, visiting dozens or even hundreds of individual websites over the course of weeks or even months. With today’s tools, this is a pain.

What we need is a tool that helps users keep track of their Search across their entire interaction with the web. Something that not only logs their Attention, it also provides an interface for expressing Intent, transforming it into better results for their Search. It should be nearly invisible, unobtrusively augmenting current Search behavior. It should help sellers as much as buyers. It should both scale well and improve with widespread use. And it should be capable of extensive user customization and open integration with existing search silos, so power-users can surprise us with new functionality and Expedia, CheapTickets, and United.com can not only interoperate, they can individually create new forms of value by providing their own customization.

It should be something like the AttentionTrust’s GestureBank, but with more focus, structure, and explicit user direction. It should be something like Doc Searl’s Vendor Relationship Management, but perhaps with more focus on the Search before users are committed to a purchase. It should work seamlessly with Microformats, OpenID, and OpenURL to link user-driven activities to the semantic web through authenticated but privacy-supporting mechanisms. And perhaps most importantly, it should make the most of open standards and open source to reach as many people as quickly as possible.

So, that’s why I’m here. Drop me a line if this is a topic of your interest.