Register: Make Way for the Contender to Google's Crown

Microdoc News: What Will It Take To Topple Google?

The first article above from Register has caught the attention of many in the blogosphere, in suggesting that a new search tool, Turbo10, may be ready to unseat Google as the best search engine around. Of course, one's first reaction to that is likely to be "utter nonsense" (particularly considering the source, as The Register is steadily developing a reputation for dubious quality reporting and opinion). I originally asked Olivier to take a look at this story, as he's nominally our search expert, and his response was something along the lines of "utter nonsense" (paraphrasing from his unprintable "French"). He then referred me to the second story above from Microdoc New, which basically calls the Register story "utter nonsense."

Indeed, the most obvious sign that it is utter nonsense that Turbo10 could be up to the job of rivaling Google comes from the fact that it has apparently been unable to deal with the PR from its sudden attention among blogs and for the last 24 hours has been offline owing to overwhelmed server capacity. Yet, I still think there is a kernel of interest sparked by this piece.

To wit, I believe Google is in dire need of reinventing itself or indeed risks losing its prominence to an upstart competitor. Granted, I don't pretend to be a "search expert," but I have been a long-time industry observer enough to feel like I have a few opinions worth ranting about on the matter.

Let's remember, when Google first came on the scene in the late '90s, there was no doubt that all the existing search tools pretty much sucked for searching the Web, as they were much more concerned with battling over "portal" features such as web-mail and news and entertainment instead of trying to make search more efficient (given that search is consistently the #1 feature that draws users to the Web in the first place). Thus, on the one hand it wasn't that hard for someone to capture the market with a better mousetrap. Yet it did take people by surprise that the mousetrap maker came out of a garage at that relatively late date in the competition for search dominance, rather than from one of the existing players building or buying better search technology. So while Google's market lead today as the preferred search tool may seem unapproachable, let's not make the same mistake twice and underestimate the likelihood that some unknown Funny Cide might yet come ripping past out of nowhere with technology that simply works better and captures user loyalty as abruptly as Google did not so long ago.

Yes, we've also heard this before that various promising new contenders were going to rival Google, including Teoma, AllTheWeb, Vivisimo and the promptly forgotten Openfind, none of which amounted to much on that score. But I believe that has more to do with the fact that none of them really improved enough on the search experience to merit user preference rather than it being any evidence of Google's supposed inherent invincibility at this point. After all, Google is much more a tool than a media property to which one might be loyal in the way people might be to the likes of The New Yorker or The Guardian or something else with voice and perspective. Google is simply a technology service, and all someone will have to do is deliver the same basic service more effectively for it to lose its golden crown.

All of which is to say that I think Google is vulnerable because, like its predecessors, it has grown complacent while there remains room for improvement. Since its inception, what has Google really done to improve upon itself anytime lately? I'm sure it's tweaking its algorithm constantly, but those are tweaks, not break-through improvements, and all of that is deliberately invisible to the user, so I (as a non-search expert) certainly haven't noticed its results getting materially more relevant over the years. In the last year, it's brought us Google News, which is appreciated, but kind of a no-brainer and a bit overdue by the time it did come to market. Beyond that? Froogle? Who actually uses that? It's been in beta for almost a year and, as far as I can tell, there's no way to even navigate directly to it, you just have to know it's there. Beyond that? Stagnation, as far as I can tell.

So what improvements would I recommend? Well, again, admitting that I'm a bit out of my element here, it seems to me there are two key ingredients to a good search tool: its ability to find stuff (its spider and search algorithm) and how it parses that information to be most useful to readers (which I'll refer to as its "interface"). Of course, Google's algorithm is what we love most about it. But I wonder if this isn't just a case of "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." It wasn't hard to do search better than Excite, AltaVista, et al, as the first generation of search engines really were (and are) quite pathetic. Google, with its secret sauce famously flavored with the importance of who and how many people point to a given page to help establish its relevancy, was a big improvement on what came before it. But I still find myself frequently frustrated by how hard it is to find stuff I'm sure is out there, despite my basic familiarity with Boolean search and Google's advanced functions page. If this is as good as searching is ever going to get on that Web, that's sad.

But it's in the interface of the search that I think Google could really stand to improve. Of course, its spare look and stripped-down results are part of its appeal (in large part because of what it does for speeding response). But there could still be room for more features, perhaps on a true Power User page that takes advanced search to the next level. Specifically, here are some features I would love to see:

• Saving Searches - I remember way back to '97 or so seeing a demo of the early prototype of Aeneid (later EoExchange, later defunct) and being blown away by their concept of letting you save searches in custom folders, so you could research away for an hour or so and come back the next day and have a record of all that work and pick up where you left off, or simply monitor regular search criteria for trending over time, such as tracking updates about competitors or your market niche. Unfortunately, EoExchange was a classic San Francisco dotcom that never really figured out its business and decided early to focus on an enterprise play instead of trying to be a consumer tool, in part hastening its demise, I would suggest.
• Target Search Classification - Google News is one baby step in this direction, but, as Microdoc News also noted, what I'd really love to see would be the ability to differentiate among types of content I'd like to limit my searches to, e.g., only news sites, only B2B news sites, only weblogs, only corporate sites, only humor sites, only multimedia content sites. Yes, to a certain extent you can do this already within the Google Directory, but that approach is too limited by what the human editors (of DMOZ) have deemed appropriate for the various topics. The directory is fine for browsing, but I can't believe, however, that technology could not improve upon that taxonomy for searching phrases in real time, or else why would they need to have created Google News as separate from the news section of the directory?
• Clustering - Teamo, AllTheWeb and especially Vivisimo do a great job with this, so why Google has ignored it is beyond me. That is, when I search a phrase, use intelligence to group together responses by related themes. For example, a search of Rick Bruner on Vivisimo suggests pages related variously to marketing, blogging, MarketingFix, my book and some dentist with the same name, among other things, so I can easily narrow my search by context.
• Relevant Sites - Google takes a page-centric approach to searches, which is usually what I want, but often what I would like to see are the best sites it recommends on certain themes. With its PageRank technology, this would be a no-brainer. For example, a search of Internet marketing on Google calls up the Internet Marketing Discussion List, which has a PageRank of 6/10 and has been defunct since 1996 ahead of ClickZ, which is still very active and has a PageRank of 8/10. That makes sense in that my search phrase "Internet marketing" is in the title of that defunct resource, but I'd also love to be able to see their returns for the sites with the highest PageRank relevancy for the general topic I'm looking for.
• Market Research - As we reported a few months ago, Google is aware that behind the scenes its search data is an incredibly valuable resource for market research. So why the hell are they keeping that to themselves? They could be earning millions licensing access to that to hungry marketers. Even simply improving basic features like "Find pages that link to the page" on their Advanced Search page, which is terribly crude, would be a big help for marketers.

Were they to package these and other features into a true Power Searcher service, I'd happily pay $25 or more per year to access such a premium product, and I'm sure so would many thousand other users who recognize that search is just too important to be satisfied with the status quo.

So, no, maybe Turbo10 is not going to be the upstart that wins the battle, unable as it is to even keep its servers online at the first PR blip it receives, but the market is definitely ripe for someone to come along and, once again, invent a better mousetrap, if Google itself has grown too fat and lazy to rise to the challenge. And I'm not alone in thinking so, either. Below are series of articles I've noticed in recent weeks debating whether Google "PageRank is dead," whether blogs are screwing up Google's search efficiency, and other related topics.

And why, Olivier asked me (when I requested earlier that he lend his expertise to write something up on the stories below), is this of any interest to MarketingFix's audience of online marketers? Come on. For starters, Google is probably the only tool every one of our readers uses ever day, so any critiques of its efficiency are likely of interest to many of you, simply as power Internet users. More to the point, search marketing is the most powerful online marketing vehicle to emerge in the last several years, so whatever happens in this space has direct relevancy to us as marketers. And Google is undeniably an 800-pound gorrilla in the online media world, so if someone really could oust their dominence, that, I would argue, is news for our readers. And let's not forget simply competitive and market research, for which search engines, particularly Google, are a vital tools. But let me not assume. Please advise me, dear MarketingFix readers: was this whole rant of any value and relevancy to your work and what you expect us to report on?