What is the future of the Internet?

Marissa Mayer has left Google to become the new CEO of Yahoo, leading to speculation about innovations she could bring. Where could Yahoo — and the rest of the Internet — go in the future?

In this video, Marissa Mayer speaks with Discovery’s Curiosity.com about what she envisions for the future of the Internet. The transcript from the interview is below: 

“Well, I think that, if you think about it, there is definitely a big push toward personalization. But today, we are very good at reactive search. You ask for something, we give it to you. We think that passive search, the, “Sure, I’m willing to think about something, even if I didn’t ask for it because it might be useful to me.” And then there’s also serendipity. How do we bring you something that might delight you, that it may not be at all obvious, that you didn’t know this morning was going to be something you were excited to know about or delight you? And those are all really important as we move forward, and all of them require personalization.

Reactive search, it’s important for us to know how you like to consume your information, what information you know already when you do a search. For a passive search, we need to know again what your preferences are. Well, if we present you with this fact or this piece of information, is that useful, or is that annoying?

And serendipity, we need to know a little bit about your personality. What kinds of things delight you? What kinds of things do you just find interesting when they’re presented to you? I think that, on all of those facets of search, personalization is really important.

Here’s more on what we predict for the future of the Internet…