The Desktop Search Model: Doomed?
May 6, 2015
Nah, doom is too strong a word. Desktop search will become a niche service. The future is mobile. Who wants to “work” from an old fashioned office? The switched on, 24×7 world is just so much more efficient. Check out the lines outside of the Washington, DC passport office or the traffic bottlenecks in Chicago. Mobility is the new modality.
I read “Now It’s Official: More Google Searches Are Coming from Mobile Than Desktop.” The write up reports:
Smartphones account for more than half of searches in 10 countries—including the U.S. and Japan—according to Google, which didn’t release exact percentages or a full list of countries. But it is playing up mobile at its annual AdWords Performance Summit, being live-streamed this afternoon. “The purchase funnel is officially dead,” proclaimed Jerry Dischler, vp of product management at Google. “What we’re seeing are these short bursts of activity that we’re calling micro-moments. We see the new challenge for marketers is to be there at those moments anytime, anywhere.”
The shift is likely to have some profound impacts. For Google, the company has to figure out how to keep its revenues flying high. For marketers, the methods for capturing attention have to be rethought. For consumers, the “search results” are likely to be skewed by the system and the advertisers.
My view of the shift is one of amusement. Those who are unable to identify and analyze information will be affected in ways large and small.
I like the old fashioned approach to research: Talking to people, reading, and using online and offline sources of information. Even then, getting a sense of what’s correct and what’s crazy is not easy.
Why work when one can allow a predictive algorithm and marketers to figure out what one needs to know? As Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, wrote:
“It is extremely difficult to obtain a hearing from men living in democracies, unless it be to speak to them of themselves. They do not attend to the things said to them, because they are always fully engrossed with the things they are doing. For indeed few men are idle in democratic nations; life is passed in the midst of noise and excitement, and men are so engaged in acting that little remains to them for thinking. I would especially remark that they are not only employed, but that they are passionately devoted to their employments. They are always in action, and each of their actions absorbs their faculties: the zeal which they display in business puts out the enthusiasm they might otherwise entertain for idea.”
Yep, the mobile thing. Busy schedules. No time to figure out what’s on the beam and what’s off.
Stephen E Arnold, May 6, 2015
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The Desktop Search Model: Doomed? : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search