Gary Price at ResourceShelf has posted Part 2 of his Q&A with Gary Flake of Yahoo! Research Labs.
One excerpt:
RS: At the beginning of 2009 what will Yahoo search look like?
GF: As I said earlier, where search goes is a function of how we and our users co-evolve with respect to one another. This means no one really knows where it will be.
My hunch is that personalization will be so good that most users will look back to web search circa 2004 as ridiculously outdated. I also think that Yahoo! will have nailed user intent to the point that we will be able to tailor the result set to focus on documents that satisfy the need behind the query, instead of returning results that
merely contain the same words as in the query.
We will also be indexing and blending from many more sources.
Many more interesting thoughts in the interview (both parts!) so check it out yourself.