As for the potential for disruptive innovation, I’d certainly like to see Google at the forefront, but I’m curious as to whether the innovation should occur inside of a major search engine company or outside, i.e., treating the major search engines as platforms as BOSS seems to be promoting as an approach. And I wouldn’t rule out completely independent innovators–as my colleagues constantly remind me, competition is only a click away.

Lee, I don’t count clustering as faceted search, though it’s certainly a related approach. Regardless, I’m not persuaded that any of the clustering approaches to web search have been successful–I’m curious which attempts you have in mind.

As for Google and Bing, both are trying to promote some amount of interactivity in the interface. Bing’s main distinctions, as I see it, are optimizing more for the “short snout” and making its interaction features more prominent in the interface. I don’t see any of this being a risk to the ad-supported model–obtaining more signal from users would increase the accuracy of ad targeting. I think the real issue is setting up user expectations that can’t be met–the problem is data quality.

As for the theory of disruptive innovation, it doesn’t apply for faceted Web search because of the nature of the search market – it can only be broken into if (a) Google buys the technology, or (b) a very large competitor comes along (i.e. Microsoft with Bing). Hence IMHO it is Google’s responsibility to tackle that diversity of tasks and topics as you so eloquently suggest, and then provide this much-needed innovation in ways that are simple and intuitive to users – i.e. by making it part of the core search, not just relegated to a small link on the results page.

Jeff, thanks. As for Bing, I didn’t think it was pursuing faceted search, beyond the Bing Visual Search that I have blogged about but which doesn’t strike me as more than a demo at this point. Query categorization may well be a key enabler for faceted search on the web, but I don’t feel Bing has connected those dots yet.

I do think that Google’s “tool belt” (aka “show options”) offers faceted search, but I’m looking for more interesting facets than time and media type. And, while you’re right that Squared’s interface doesn’t use the facets it presents as refinement options, it does present results using a faceted classification scheme. It’s a relatively small step to make the presented values act as refinements–the real issue here is improving data quality.

In any case, I think we’re agreeing that faceted search for general web search may really just be a matter of accumulating verticals, perhaps stretching the concept of a vertical a bit to include task focus rather than content focus. Indeed, “general web search” may someday be the last resort when we can’t better constrain the nature of the user’s information need.

I was surprised you didn’t mention Bing’s efforts with their query categorization system. I think they’ve been leading here.

I’m not sure that I would classify Google Squared as faceted search. I think the attempts with “show options” that add time, media type, etc… was an important step.

One of the key reasons for my research interest in vertical search is the ability to apply faceted search. For many verticals, the facets are based on aspects of the content useful to support a specific set of tasks. For web search, a better understanding of common tasks would help define useful facets. The challenge is tackling the diversity of tasks and topics.

I’m also not sure that it is a wining formula. I believe for expoloratory search you need social signals, as it works better than machine extracted metadata.