One of these people is Tim Mayer, who had a long tenure at Yahoo holding titles such as VP of Search Products, VP of Search Business, and most recently, VP of North American Audience. WebProNews spoke with Mayer at PubCon Las Vegas to learn more about his intuitions and why he believes they will come true.

First of all, he believes that we are dealing with a much more competitive search environment. As Bing brings new innovations to game, Google responds with their own developments. The search industry has also recently seen changes to the search experience with the launch of Google Instant. In addition, Google has made dramatic changes to Local search.

“I think… very prominent changes are going to continue to happen throughout different verticals and have more interaction with the search experience in the future,” he said.

Mayer told WebProNews that he sees mobile search growing in the future. As he explains, 1 out of every 5 searches are expected to be mobile searches by 2012. He believes this will grow even more as mobile and tablets become more popular.

Incidentally, people use apps more often than they use the browser on these mobile devices. But when they do use the browser, their queries are much shorter. In a move that would better serve users, he said that voice interaction would continue to grow in the future.

Another area he sees growth in is with brands. In the past, many offline brands did not have an online presence. For this reason, users would go to places such as Yahoo to meet their needs. Today, however, most offline brands do have an online presence that users want to interact with, which gives an added value to vertical search engines such as YouTube and Amazon.

How do you see these areas growing in the future?

In an exclusive video interview with WebProNews Yahoo and Google announced a collaborative site called sitemaps.org. Tim Mayer states in the video, “This is something we are announcing tonight at around 9 PM tonight (Las Vegas) Google and Yahoo have gotten together to provide webmasters and publishers a unified way to send their content … let our search engines know about new and existing content.”

Vanessa Fox of Google added, “So we are launching a new site, Sitemaps.org and that will be jointly supported by Yahoo and Google and it will have the sitemaps protocol there. Over time as we evolve it as sort of a collaborative effort all of the information will be there. We are really hoping that this will help webmasters to have an open standard and make it much easier so that they don’t have to worry about one type of feed for one engine and another type of feed for another engine.”
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There are certain partnerships you cannot ignore and if Google and Yahoo are involved, jointly, then most of the free world will take notice. With that in mind, Tim Mayer of Yahoo and Vanessa Fox of Google have announced, exclusively to WebProNews, they have combined forces to launch Sitemaps.org. This service gives webmasters and siteowners a sitemaps.org tool that will be usable by all the search engines willing to participate.

Not only are Google and Yahoo collaborating on this project, they’ve also issued an open invitation to the other search engines willing to join. Microsoft accepted that invitation and will jointly support Sitemaps.org and its efforts.