You can't really get by in commercial web world without being really interested and knowledgeable in search. Aside from being one of the most likely ways users discover sites, search advertising swallows up almost 60% of the available web advertising spend in the UK. (Enders Analysis)
Since moving from the BBC Radio 1, where you have the authority of the BBC URL and a whopping great radio station to promote you're stuff, I've read-up, talked on and generally got to grips with search or to put it bluntly got to grips with Google. Given that Google has a massive market share the word search is synonymous with Google.
Google's irrepressible growth highlights why the company is so reluctant to delay its search-advertising partnership with Yahoo because if it delays any further, its share of the search market will have grown so large as to make the deal utterly pointless.
If you were a search start-up you might see Google's dominance from very different lights. You may believe that the battle is now beyond reach, not because search isn’t a great place to be or because you can’t create innovative technologies, but because the investment required to build and operate an Internet-scale, high performance crawling, indexing, and query serving farm were now so great that only the largest Internet companies had a chance of competing.
Yet you could take the line that Google's dominance is actually it's Achille's heal. Scale produces barriers to innovation both from philosophical sense (wedded to a strong corporate vision) and from a cost perspective (rolling out to +60% of the market is pricey). Add that to the fact that search still a nascent technology and Google is unlikely to hold onto it's market share indefinitely. As audiences demands of search become ever more sophisticated the search market could fragment into a number of specialist providers offering a particular flavour of search.
Until now I've had a hard time finding genuinely useful alternative engines. Google has done a fairly good job on the iPhone and other GPS enabled devices at location aware search and their blog search isn't bad either. However, Searchme is a small Sequoia-backed company that is going to change the way you look at search.
The main difference between SearchMe and Google is that it returns results primarily in a visual format, via an image of the result site. The results are displayed in a way that is similar to cover flow in iTunes.
Really impressed that it seems to be capturing the latest BBC homepage and News homepage and not relying on a out-of-date cache.
SearchMe isn’t all flashy graphics. They are also auto-categorizing every page in the index to help users with disambiguation. A search for “Apple” can be done in the category “technology” to avoid results about fruit.
No question that win-win is the way to go, this is how I do it for myself and the people I work with :-) Sadly there are bad apples everywhere, and you can only hope that they will learn one day that this is not the right way to do things. Until then, the best is to stay away from these type.
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