Is the game simply over in online search?
News of any new search engine brings a wistful smile to my face, accompanied by this patronizing sentiment: “Aww, those sweet kids — look at them trying to compete with Google. Isn’t that cute?”
But few market positions remain entrenched forever. Microsoft has dominated the desktop OS for ages now, but in the long history of commerce, it may be just a blip that seems magnified to us because the history of desktop computers itself is pretty short. In the case of Google’s dominance over online search, the history of the market is even shorter. To restrict the whole game to the established players — Google, then Yahoo and a bunch of stragglers like MSN and Ask.com — is probably shortsighted. At some point in the future, some company is likely to out-Google Google, just as, in the past 35 years, Toyota has gone from being an down-market upstart to lording it over the once-dominant General Motors. But a generation before that, it had seemed unthinkable that GM could ever displace Ford as the top auto maker.
What got me thinking of this is Fred Wilson’s post about a new search engine called SearchCrystal. Like Dogpile.com and others before it, SearchCrystal is a meta-engine, meaning that it compiles and organizes results from other search engines. But SearchCrystal offers its results in a new way: instead of listing them down the page, it organizes them radially — like a target — with the most relevant results toward the center of the display.
Who knows if this innovation is enough to get many people to switch away from Google? But at least those crazy SearchCrystal kids have come out swinging with a new idea for how to organize online searches. A hundred years ago, it seemed crazy that the US Navy wouldn’t want coaling stations for its ships in far-flung locales like Hawaii and the Philippines; today the very idea is quaint, since Navy ships run off of diesel fuel or, in many cases, nuclear power. Maybe someday the idea of Google organizing a laundry list of results will seem just as quaint, and the dominance of SearchCrystal — or some other upstart — will seem as natural as Toyota’s does today.
Category: Internet, Technology3 Comments so far
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Thanks for discussing searchCrystal.
I am one of the developers of searchCrystal.
Google is great if you are looking for one or a few good results.
If you need to see the “big picture” and are researching a topic for work or school: searchCrystal shows you the quality of the results and guides you toward potentially authoritative results.
searchCrystal is a power search tool that complements Google … so it is not so much “either or” and more “as well as.”
What sets searchCrystal apart from other meta search engines is that it does not pollute the results with “sponsored links” and, more importantely, it fully takes advantage of what meta search can offer by visualizing how the search engines agree:
a) the more engines that find a result and the more highly they rank it, the better the result;
b) the greater the agreement between the search engines, the better the quality of results.
searchCrystal can also be used as a competitive intelligence or SEO tool, since it provides a “visual mirror” of how the search engines see specific topics.
Tim,
I thought you might be interested in another new search tool. It comes from Jonathan Harris and it’s called “universe.” http://universe.daylife.com/
I was turned on to it by TED.com
Anselm & Joe–
Thanks for these comments. Probably SearchCrystal and “universe” will never dislodge the mondo search engines at the top of the food chain, but that’s fine. They *do* offer fascinating new ways of visualizing relationships around information, which I think is vital for cutting through the info-overwhelm that faces us today. If you’re looking for ONE SPECIFIC thing, you’ll probably use Google (or Yahoo, or Ask); but if you’re poking around to find out more about something, these seem to be ideal.
What will be interesting is to see how these applications exploit (or create?) particular niches in search that lie beyond the typical uses of search that we think of.