Link: A Gaggle of Google Wannabes is an interesting article from Catherine Holahan over at Businessweek. Basically it's looking at how some of the competitors are stacking up against Google, and how well, or otherwise they're doing. I'm not, to be honest, sure exactly what she's trying to say, since the piece is rather confusing, though I think her viewpoint is that the competition to Google is trying their best, but they probably won't manage it, but on the other hand, they might. Nothing like hedging your bets I suppose.
Anyway, onto the piece. She looks at Ask, (a tortoise), trying to come up with better methods of searching to compete with Google. Bit of a newsflash here - they already are. The ability to expand or narrow searches, greater accuracy, more targetted results are already showing Google up.
There is a laughable quote in the piece from Matt Cutts (who I think is one of the good guys by the way) who says 'We have more engineers working on core search technology than ever before'. Right.... if that's the case, why is limit by date STILL broken? Why can't Google provide the same functionality or flexibility as Yahoo, MSN, Exalead, Accoona and a bunch of others?
Catherine points out that Ask's algorithm works better than Google's, particularly with related searches. Clusty has the Clusty Cloud, a more useful feature than the 'usual dump of results that you get at Google' according to their CEO.
Live Search with the ability to customise different home pages and share those with users should make an impact on Google. Social search engines, with Yahoo and Eurekster leading the way are blowing Google out of the water.
There's an issue of trust. Users for some bizarre reason, trust Google. But why? When a search for 'Martin Luther King' turns up a race hate site at the top of the list, when even Google itself has admitted to worries about the results of a search for 'Jew', people trust it? If anyone trusts the results that Google returns well, they're being stupid, quite frankly.
And yet... and yet... Google is still gaining market share in the face of the newly launched capabilities of the other engines. Google could, if it chose, easily acquire or replicate any search method that made significant headway. I think this is the point, and it is the one that gets me really angry with Google. They're quite happy to provide a second rate search service (and let's be honest here, that's exactly what it is) because they can do. They're not actually that bothered about improving search (and I'm sorry, but such sorry ineptitude as their Shakespeare offering doesn't really cut it) until someone comes up with something that might take away their market share. Sure, at that point they'll do something about it, but not because it's in the best interests of the end searcher, but because it's in the best interests of Google itself. And that arrogant distain for the people who put it where it currently is, the searchers, is something that I find appalling.
Comments