Why The Search Game Isn't Over And Google Hasn't Won

The other day I jokingly proposed a new startup, kind of a play on music discovery site Last.FM. Maybe it'd be called Lastsearch.FM. Anyway, the basic idea is this: everyone uploads all of the search engines they have in their Firefox search bar, then you system recommends you new search engines based on some social filtering. It's a joke obviously, the idea of socially filtering out what search engines you need to use is pretty darn silly. But, I realize it says something important: I'm using a lot more than Google search these days. Here's what I have right now in my Firefox search bar:

• Google (general stuff)
• Amazon (goods)
• Answers.com (definitions)
• eBay (goods)
• The Hype Machine (music)
• Edgar 10-K Search (SEC filings)
• YouTube (videos, often music)
• Del.icio.us (not sure, really)
• Technorati (heh, I know)
• Last.fm (music)
• Summize (Twitter search)
• Wikipedia (often the best source)

Sure, for the most part I use Google for general searches, but a good percentage of the time, I know which site I expect to find the result on. I'll do a search like 'site: paidcontent.org Viacom'.

The point is that the number of times I Just do a general, ignorant query on Google is growing increasingly rare. My behavior might be a little bleeding edge, but the point is that it's very convenient and useful to divide search among different sites like this, and over time, more people's behavior will go in this direction. What won't happen (probably) a mass exodus to Microsoft or Yahoo search, barring something totally (totally) unexpected.

I also want to call out Summize in particular. It's really simple, and basically it just searches people's Twitters, but if you want to get people's take on that's going on right now, it's the way to go. For example, I used it to see how people were reacting to Diary of A Call Girl, the new show on Showtime that has a lot of sex in it. And I used it to gauge reactions to the Russert Memorial today. I also used it the other day when I was in the waiting room at the Dr's and it proved to be the best way of keeping up with the scores in real time. You know that stuff that that guy Frank Luntz does, with the real-time debate reaction analysis? He does it for Fox News, and for the most part, it's kind of silly. But there's something to it, and there's a lot that can be done here. This site is going places.

Comments

[Tim Swanson]

Delicious is a social tagging service now run by Yahoo. It can be very useful if you read a lot of web-based material.

You create a profile and from there you can add links to it. You can tag each link with any words and even write a brief summary. One of my friends at HowToGeek.com (a popular software site) uses it religiously to store and recall useful stories/sites.

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