Build your complex search: social, behavioral, and micro-economic perspective on modern Web search

So far, Web search has been a playground for few giants. However, while traditional search engines are superb in their ability of extracting the Web pages that most closely match with user’s keywords, they fail in going beyond such simple paradigm. On the other side, an increasing number of data sets is becoming available on the Web as (semi) structured data instead of userconsumable pages. Web search has huge potentials for improvement thanks to the high quality of these data sources, but this can be achieved only by designing new search applications that federate those sources. To tackle the long tail of user requirements and tastes, the need arises for new ways of thinking and designing search applications: application providers (and perhaps even end users) will need to build their own, customized search experiences, by combining search services available on the Web at the purpose of solving specific search needs. Individual and collective social experience will be more and more influencing search results. In our work we investigate the social, economic, and behavioral trends that push towards a completely different interpretation of the search task on the Web. We discuss how the technology and the micro-economic models must change to face these challenges.