SXSW Interactive. Springtime in Austin brings beautiful weather (and long lines for just about everything) to lovely Austin, TX. The growth in attendence to this conference has been amazing to watch over the last few years.

With all due respect to Mr. Webb and his panel competing for my attention (my answer: they should), I stayed around for Marissa Mayer’s presentation about the “fast, fun, future” of search. I love studying search patterns as an observational tool, as search is an expression of user desire. The talk centered around the continued use of layers of meaning to refine results. The example people see most often is location – location as a layer of meaning that helps understand and predict the meaning behind a query. And this trend is going to continue with additional layers of meaning used in conjunction with location to find answers.

Imagine looking at an image of a bird and wondering, “what kind of bird is that?” A query to Tha Goog appends meaning gathered from location and time of year – so knowing you’re in Austin, Texas in the springtime helps deduce that you’re looking at the mockingbird, the state bird of Texas. How does it do this? Context. There’s a relationship between Austin, March, birds, species distribution, migration patterns. Knowing the context around a query helps to refine the output.

I wonder if this evolution is the result of last year’s acquisition of Metaweb, the makers of Freebase – the system that structures a graph of relationships between entities. Data is categorized and structured in such a way to create the intelligence necessary to answer the question; through the structure, it “knows” that the mockingbird is the answer to the query.

Enough about search. Imma go meet Pee Wee and Mike Tyson.