Surviving Universal Search: What?
July 10, 2009
Pippa Nutt, director, online strategy, Northern Lights Direct Response, wrote “How You and Your Company Can Survive Universal Search”. I read the story in DM News and was tangled in my sneaker laces. The term “universal search” has been a baffler to me when I saw it recycled as part of Google’s PR push for putting information from its separate indexes on one result page. In the way of search, not much was new with this announcement because metasearch, federated search, and mash ups were last year’s T shirt when Google’s marketing machine produced this phrase at the hastily organized Searchology Day a couple of years ago. Now, the term is used in the first paragraph of a direct marketing publication’s story without definition or context.
This is a signal that:
- Google controls the search agenda, rendering other companies’ efforts about as important as my neighbor’s new lawn mower. He cares but I don’t.
- A buzzword is assumed to be understood by professionals in the marketing world when few can agree on what “search” itself means. “Universal search” is even more anchor free.
- The article invokes other types of search, again without context or explanation.
Little wonder that when I talk with senior managers, search is essentially a black hole of knowledge. Everyone thinks he or she knows what it is. Upon questioning, I find that defining terms is the * essential first step * when talking about search. Skip this and the conversation is for me almost meaningless.
Stephen Arnold, July 10, 2009
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