search is (relatively) solved
June 1st, 2009 • posts i've written
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Bing went live today (or better said, Live went Bing, today). For those not in the know, Bing is Microsoft’s facelift on its search engine, Live. It’s basically been fitted with a few endearing bells and whistles (though many of these features existed in Live, but you didn’t know about them).
So far, Bing is getting some decent reviews (aside from the name itself). But the press generally love novelty, and in this economy, they don’t get to see much of it anymore (btw, novelty is the place to be right now). Press is press – it sure isn’t a guarantee of usership. After a few searches, Bing appears to be a textbook example of good money after bad. Sites have already tried to compete with Google on ‘pretty’ and failed. For all intents and purposes, Live was a decent search engine – but so are Altavista, Lycos, and Excite (no, seriously). Search engines suffer from the same problem as washing machines, we live in a world full of pretty good products. Unless you genuinely innovate, you’re stuck in a game of who can spend the most money to see microscopic growth.
In other words, search is solved… relatively. We’ll continue to see incremental improvements, but the task of typing in a query and getting a slew of helpful responses has been tackled quite well. Bing is a waste of talent, time, and money. Microsoft is busy building a beautiful iron lung instead of curing polio.
Discovery, on the other hand, is ripe for exploration. Most of our favorite sites still do a poor job of suggesting new stuff our social graph is digging. The web is rich in passive user data, and we’ve done a thorough job of self selecting groups of people that share common interests – combine the two and you get an instant intelligent content generator.
In case you were curious, what consumes me sees 88% of search traffic come from Google, 4% from Yahoo!, .75% from AOL, and .55% from Live (according to Google Analytics).
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3 Responses (add your comment)
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jason Gingold June 2, 2009at 9:53 am
Bud,
Really like this idea. How do we discover? And better yet, are too many tools to aid in discovery a detriment to the true spirit and thrill of actual discovery?
I love my curator-cadre that I’ve been building up over time – everything from people i look to on tumblr to twitter to blogs to reliance on stumble upon, blah blah blah. i rely on them and am thrilled when they point me in the direction of something i’d never heard of, seen, or considered.
but the real sense of discovery – that aha! moment of unearthing something unique and original – is not necessarily found in having someone show you the way there.
i guess i’d like the best of both worlds. a tool that pointed me in some interesting directions without actually giving me the jewel in the cave. i want to find that myself. but i know i need help. hm…more thoughts?
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It´s not about novelty anymore. And that´s why Bing fails. It does not jump the curve as google wave…
In Norway a search engine called Kvasir.no have moved from the slogan “Through norwegian eye” to “A smarter way to search” roughly translated. And have tried to enrich the seacrh results. Not exactly google wave, but at least they try to improve the product.
Keep up the good work – always great insights from you
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Bing is GREAT! I enjoy the interactivity of the search results.