Okay Geek Farm
Search is changing and Google isn't moving fast enough
Connor Scalleat
Search is ever-changing, and if Google doesn’t catch up fast enough where will we all go? If no one else steps up, we’re still going to be at Google, for better or worse. It’s time we start thinking of search engines in a completely different way; real-time results and mobile queries.
Google has completely dominated the search market, pushing Yahoo more and more towards bankruptcy everyday. Currently, Google is surpassing 72% market share in the U.S and has gained much higher market shares in other countries. In 2009, Bing was released and was supposed to change the way we think about search, and actually provided competition for Google. Bing’s immediate popularity has slowly been on a decline and just cannot compete with Google’s product or resources. Today, Bing also powers Yahoo search which did almost nothing for its market share, despite what critics predicted.
Overall, search has really no competition, and equally everyone seems to have no complaints about their shitty search results. Google could implement absolutely horrible features and would lose a very small percentage of their market share. Although the search market is not considered a monopoly, it is certainly not known for its great leaps in innovation and fierce competition.
What’s so bad about Google?
Personally, I use Google 24/7 and I tried Bing for a couple days and just couldn’t get into it. Using Google constantly I’ve noticed the massive amount of spam that I am currently receiving. From companies rigging Google’s system, to crap sponsored results and things completely not relevant at all to what I’m looking for — in the end it’s all just plain spam. And for some, it might be a stretch to believe that Google would have to rig their own results, but they do so constantly. Google made a statement to the New York Times stating that they “modified (their) algorithm to stop rewarding websites that were using immoral practices to boost business.” I myself see nothing wrong with this; its Google’s website and they can do with it what they please. The problem is that I don’t particularly like to support a company rigging its engine, however my issue is that if I ever decide to find another search engine there aren’t too many options available.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a big deal, I was lucky enough to hear the founder of Pepperjam, an SEO company, speak last year. He talked about how much of a growing market this really is and how relations are quite easy; he stated all we have to do is keep up on Google’s current algorithms. Google can be rigged and that is a fact, though despite popular belief the pagerank system currently has little to do with your placement on Google’s search results — PageRank is essentially how much Google trusts your blog.
Content Farm Disaster
Google and Bing both face a major problem when it comes to content farms. Content farms are owned by major companies composed of lots of writers (usually freelance) who create and write lots of pointless written content. This content is usually aimed at the most searched items and make their way up to the top of Google. Once you open these websites you notice they have all purposeless content. Websites like this cause great harm to Google because they have gamed the engine’s systems and the only option is for search engines to take down or remove their content. Problems arise when this happens because people do not think it is rightful on Google’s part to be able to take down content; on the other hand, people also hate being linked to these spam filled websites.
The Facebook and Google Debacle
Many people don’t understand the threat that Facebook has on Google. This threat is the real-time human quality results. Facebook has people liking content and content being searchable based upon the number of likes and interaction. Google has bots that scan the web searching through files and pages, while Facebook has humans doing the same thing except it’s being updated real-time and provides the human quality to things that bots can’t find. Although Facebook has never really capitalized on this idea this is something they could very easily do, which is why they are such a big scare for Google.
Google’s Success and Triumph Over Other Engines
Google really does have a cool product and really triumphed over other search engines in America’s free market system. Although, Google does have a secret behind their success, and that is their cheap hardware and ability to keep up with the expanding web. Competitors such as AltaVista were running on big, expensive machines running processors like the DEC Alpha. Google could deploy its system on any PC with cheap hardware and could easily grab all the content needed from the web. Along with that, they could keep up with what users were doing and how many clicks each item was getting, allowing their engine to evolve rapidly. All this led to what Google is today, which has greatly expanded from just a search engine into a multi-faceted corporation.
Google is Improving
Google isn’t going to let their product just go to waste, they know about all of the problems and have addressed them accordingly. They have a lot of places to advance, and they really need to redefine search as much as they do fix it. Google is deploying many systems across the board to stop spam and developing new algorithms daily to make their bots faster and more efficient.
Google is even trying to redefine search with many new products and I can imagine even trying to implement many Facebook-like features into their engine. It is possible Google could even start their own social network, if they could actually execute something correctly. Google Hotpot is a perfect example of Google trying to think about how search can get more personal and give results that matter to you. The service is a venue review service which directly integrates into Google search. Hotpot is a recommendation engine of sorts with all the information you need in one place. It pulls some of this information depending on your location, taste, and friends’ taste. This is just one step forward that Google is taking to give you not so much results as answers. Weather and stocks is another good example of Google being smart in the way they help you find information.
The Future of Search
The future of search is in two frontiers: instant answers and mobile search. We have seen advancements in both of these frontiers by Google recently, and now with Larry Page back as CEO, we are supposed to see more advancements in mobile search than ever before. Google’s recent products such as Hotpot really recognize where they need to go, and although merely a very small piece of the whole puzzle, it is slowly being put together.
Search engines really need to focus on bringing you results relevant to the query and you. The more important part of that statement is bringing results catered to your personal interests and tastes. Recommendation engines are not hard and we have seen social ones go over great, such as GetGlue. Imagine if Google either built a recommendation engine on their own or ported ones from around the web. Facebook even knows what your tastes are based upon the pages you liked. Google could easily port this information from other social networks or build their own where you simply just tell it what you like. Imagine a day when you enter a search query about a book or restaurant and based upon your friends’ tastes and your tastes, it tells you what books they liked, pulls up their reviews, recommends the book to you or not, and based upon your location, shows you where you can pick up the book. Hotpot already has the idea of restaurants implemented into this thought process, seeing as it knows what you and your friends already like and then recommends more to you based upon that.
Search engines have to be smart, just like we have seen with Wolfram|Alpha, the computational knowledge engine. If you put a mathematics question, equation, or problem into an search engine it should be able to solve it immediately. Imagine putting in a chemical symbol or a word; the search engine should be able to display the definition and all information needed without even clicking on a link. Wolfram|Alpha is a fantastic example of this and something that could very easily be implemented in Google search. Although search is all about the amount of time it takes to display results, and Wolfram|Alpha just isn’t fast enough yet; if Google or Bing could perfect this, they would strike a smart search engine gold mine.
The future of search is real-time answers and results without having to go through pages and pages of links. Google has already started to move in this direction by showing stocks, weather, and medical information as soon as you type in a query. Queries that are not available for being instantly answered need to be able to have their results tailored to you and not just relevant. When you think about it, who is to define how relevant something is without knowing the user that is searching for this information.
Being social is something that Bing has not even attempted at yet and something that Google has failed at time and time again. Engines need to be able to relate your friends and your social life to your searches. If you search for a product you should be able to see which one of your friends has the product and how they like it. Blippy is a service that has mastered what products you own and how you like them along with Blippr, which tells you how your friends rate products and services. Again, either Google should build their very own, or port these two services into their engine for the most relevant search results.
The Feel of Search
Overall search is a science that is astounding. They can crawl through and analyze trillions of pages across the entire internet, which allows them to return relevant response to any queries. These engines are becoming more smart and social everyday. Despite not really pushing competition or major UI changes, algorithms and relevance keeps increasing as spam and content farms keep increasing; it is a constant war that will always be ongoing and troubling search engines. Algorithms need to be changed and the way we think about search needs to be redefined. The user cannot sit back any longer and allow Google to have the same technologies for years on end. We need to advance in some of the most helpful fields on the web. In a world where we need to become smarter, so do our content gatherers.
Information is now at the touch of our fingertips and major search companies need to understand and tailor to this fact. People have their location tied to them 24/7 and the web needs to know to better your experience. Mobile technologies and networks are the way of the future and we can already see that with the advancement in this market. People need to be able to search the web smarter on their phones than they do on the computer. This is the main environment where it needs to be an answer-and-decision engine and not so much a search engine.
Being social and displaying more relevant results is an obvious statement that the people at Google and Bing really need to expand on. With Facebook surpassing Google as the most visited website on the internet, we need to think why this is and expand on these excellent services. Real-time results gives us real answers to current questions pulling up data from real people — think Twitter trends.
Since the current model of the internet is going to be around for quite some time, at least for the foreseeable future, we need a way to index all of it. Currently our system is definitely not the most efficient answer. Google and Bing are the only two in this market and I personally think this needs to change and want to see majorly new ideas. Google is advancing much faster than Bing and I’m excited to see their future, although currently I don’t feel too energized about their product. We need to redefine the way we think about search and the way we think about gathering masses of data.
