The Collision of Search Thinkers and the Wide World of Finding
January 4, 2022
To get some insight into the vibrations set off when search thinkers run into market behaviors, you will want to scan the Twitter thread about the need to create an alternative to Google. The focus is medical information. The idea is to return results for a health query without “clickbait sites riddled with crappy ads.” The criticism of the Google was not ignored. No less a luminary than Danny Sullivan replied with Google’s “we are always looking to keep improving our results.”
Digital Don Quixotes saddled up and asserted in this Tweet stream that Google can be beaten. The fix is to create a niche search engine tailored to provide results where Google is just thrilled to present “spam.” Assorted Tweeters added comments.
What do these two Tweeter threads suggest to me?
First, there are niche search engines(what I call vertical search services) that deliver on point results. These are probably not ones most people think about because users of free or ad-supported systems do not know much about finding high value information. Also, I know from my decades in the commercial database business that most “online experts” don’t want to pay for access to commercial online services. Academics get “free” access to content pools like Lexis Nexis, and the “old” Dialog type files because institutions pay the license fees. To the academic user, high value information is “free.” It is not.
Second, a number of Web centric search engines provide reasonably useful results. Examples range from iSeek.com to the Metager system. The mechanism for locating specific information is to frame a query, manually or automatically pass the query to numerous search engines, de-duplicate the result sets, and examine the links. Industrious searchers may enlist tools like Maltego or other open source software to identify potentially helpful items to examine initially. Who wants to do this? I suggest that fewer than three percent of online users pursue this approach. People want to have the mobile phone light up when a pizza joint is nearby or the Tesla’s electric gauge is creeping into the “hello, I need a flat bed truck, please” zone.
Third, Google has operated without meaningful regulation, oversight, or competition for decades. The vaunted ad-revenue engine was not a Google invention. Google took advantage of a particular point in time when searching the Web was gaining traction and useful competition from Alta Vista, Exalead, and Fast Search’s AllTheWeb services were distracted. Google sucked up some AltaVista folks; Exalead was decidedly French; and Fast Search chased the enterprise. Other actions transpired, but the result was that the Google used free to get traffic and traffic made the Yahoo, Overture, GoTo revenue model work like a champ. Remember this was decades ago, not yesterday.
Here’s what I think is going on:
- Pundits don’t know or care much about Okeano, Swisscows or other “free” online search systems. How about searching for those Instagram snaps with Picuki?
- Niche search engines are thriving; for example, some of the Israeli specialized software and services firms provide quite helpful access to Facebook content. Who knows? Not too many pundits on the Tweeter and certainly not Google’s PR experts.
- Google is not a search engine. Google is a global content system, a fact I explored in my Google: The Digital Gutenberg, originally a long white paper for a government customer who found my view of the world interesting. BearStearns published a report in 2007 which featured my diagram of the Google “octopus” which identified the digital fabric that the company was weaving. Now Google owns the sheep, the dyes, the weaving machines, and the concept of digital fabrics. The overall quality of the Google outputs is “good enough,” and, believe me, it is tough to knock off a global outfit which satisfies the big hump in the standard distribution with something “better.” Whatever “better” means.
Net net: Search is a very, very fuzzy word. At one end of the spectrum are those who are searching well because they can locate an Uber-type service. At the other end of the spectrum are those who deal in extremely rarified content disciplines and have quite good services available; for example, Daylight chemical informatics.
In the middle? A long-standing, persistent and fundamental disconnect between search and what is actually going on in the datasphere.
Pizza? Google’s got that nailed. Need information to fabricate calandria (nuclear terminology)? Google can’t help too much because who searches for calandria, buys ads related to calandria, or knows anything about calandria?
Stephen E Arnold, January 4, 2021
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