Google will lose it’s search lead by 2010
July 12th, 2007
Google used to be the leader in finding a needle in a haystack but they lost that edge about 3 years ago. Face it, their search results are stagnate. Moreso, it’s in their best interest to have lousy search results, Why? because the more ineffective their results, the more visitors click on their paid ads. It was only last year that an analyst pointed this out.
Yahoo today runs much like Google did 5 years ago. At time of this writing, look at how Yahoo can accurately pinpoint an obscure webpage while google can’t…
Google has 4 pages of results, all fail to find the correct webpage:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=long+kongs+second+trip+to+burma+ranong&meta=
Yahoo Nails it:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=long+kongs+second+trip+to+burma+ranong&fr=yfp-t-501&toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8
This is just one example, but I’ve been doing these comparisons for years. Google’s done as far as being the search leader. So who will emerge as the new leader in search? Perhaps a company that actually cares about doing search correctly rather than focusing it’s attention on driving ad revenue and weeding out spammers.
I believe the biggest problem with search today is that practically no effort is placed on how the questions are asked. Search, in the past 10 years has been 99% focused on picking up on keywords in the babble people enter into the search field, and then finding webpages relevant to certain key words contained in the babble.
I feel that a new pioneer in search will emerge with 2 technological strengths that quickly and easily make it a market leader.. First, they will spend equal or more effort on the format, sentence structure and semantics pertaining to HOW questions are asked, guiding the user and helping them ask the right question in the right way. Yahoo is just now starting to do that.
And second, they will harness the collective input of the web in wiki manner to better enhance and refine their results. DMOZ made significant grounds on this front years ago and even Google uses it as one of the key pillars in determining pagerank, but DMOZ is losing the battle in that their CGI technology is too old and clunky and they have very ineffective editor management capabilities.
Nobody can take away what Google has accomplished, I was an early fan and am still amazed with what they are doing, Google Earth for example. But I no longer use them as my defacto search tool and feel someone will soon come along with drastically more relevant search.
