Does anyone really want to search for something? Does anyone really want to sift through reams of files, sort through a massive list, or go drawer by drawer looking for that missing sock?

Of course not. There is no joy in searching. There is, however, joy in finding. My apologies for those of you who think it’s about the journey and the destination. In the case of search vs. find, it’s the destination not the journey. As technology evolves, companies get smarter, and expectations increase people become less patient or forgiving. People want it now. They want it quickly. Oh, and they don’t want to pay for it.

The search engine of the future, won’t be a search engine. It won’t be a tool that requires you to visit link after link in hopes of stumbling upon the desired result. Though search engines have gotten smarter, they are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. No, the search engine of the future will be a engine that focused on findability. It will be a tool that helps you FIND what you were looking for instead of browsing results in hopes of finding what you were looking for.

But, here’s the thing. In my humble opinion, the only way that’s going to happen is if people realize, understand, and accept the concept of mutual exchange. They are going to have to give something to get something. If people want a better individualized search engine, they’re going to need to provide information to help make the engine better. They will need to part with personal information. They will need to provide ongoing feedback.

People, not servers and mathematical algorithms are going make the difference. It’s the people that will cause a shift from search to find. We’re seeing this happen already with “human powered” search engines like Mahalo and Wikipedia. Last year when Google allowed people to customize and change search results with a new feature called Search Wiki we saw a glimpse of the future. Unfortunately, it was just a glimpse and nothing more. The next step for Google will be to aggregate all of those human powered changes and allow them to impact the overall search results. While, that’s the right next step, I don’t think we’ll see it happening anytime soon.

They aren’t adding more time in the day. Speed and accuracy are becoming more important. We all want answers to our questions and queries. I just don’t think we ever realized how big of a role we’d be playing in generating those quick, accurate, answers.