After the Consumer Electronics Show this month, where I met with the executives from Ford and heard about their ambitious voice search plans, I kept wondering how the ability to conduct voice searches from their cars will change how people search, communicate, access information, and drive. It then made me wonder about all of the venues and devices people can search from. At CES, Dick Tracy, James Bond, and Inspector Gadget would have had a field day testing out the latest gizmos (if they could avoid Gadget’s nemesis Dr. Claw tricking them into joining a booby-trapped tweet-up).

These new devices aren’t meant to be solely for Inspectors; they’re supposed to be for all of us. Here’s a vision for how searches will differ when conducted in different settings from different devices. In all of these situations, we’ll take the example of a young, female, Dallas-based professional named Penny who’s searching for the best cupcakes.

INDOORS

Home PC

Query: “best cupcakes dallas tx.” Penny has a craving for something sweet after dinner, so she spends a few minutes trying to find recommendations. She uses Yahoo where, thanks to SearchMonkey, reviews from Yelp and Citysearch appear on the search engine results page.

Work PC

Query: “cupcakes plano tx.” It’s her receptionist’s birthday and Penny wants to find something near the office.

ON THE GO

Twitter

Query: “does anyone have any favorite cupcake places in dallas? I hope sam’s not following me or it’ll ruin the surprise ” She texts this to 40404 and uses TweetReplies.com to get responses emailed to her.

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