The Future of Search: Will Fragmented Search Mean Death by a Thousand Shards for GooHoo?
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 18, 2008 | Share This
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So I’m stalking this girl who rejected me in high school and Google just isn’t delivering the detailed, timely information I need to stake out her current place of residence and/or job. What’s a mentally imbalanced loner to do?
This morning my colleague Ruth Nightengale, Vice President of Account Management at Reprise Media, sent me a blog post by Marci Albomer at the New York Times. Well Marci, you’re now on the shortlist to get your own dedicated shrine in my apartment thanks to drawing my attention to pipl.com. Pipl bills itself as “The most comprehensive people search on the web” and claims to trawl the “Deep Web.” The Deep Web is not the part of the web where Foucault discussion groups live (though it can be), rather it’s the equivalent to dark matter on the net, great gobs of unindexed material that the search engines don’t see. You’ve also got to love the testimonial banner on the top of pipl’s homepage. That’s gonna come back to haunt somebody at the trial…
Running a few people who owe me money through the site however didn’t give me radically different results than I got from Google. In fact Google powers the web search part of pipl. The biggest difference was integrating and organizing results from zabasearch (for address records) and other places by category and geography.
Pipl is part of a growing trend in specialized, vertical Search sites. Local.com is another good example, though their site navigation is a tad tricky. Popping
Google is well aware of the proliferation of these specialized vertical search sites and has done things like launch Google Local , ramped up universal search results and made deals with other search engines (whoever could I mean?) to try to continue their dominance of the market. But there is always a tension for Google between their belief in a sparse uncluttered homepage and adding features.
The question is whether Google serves enough different types of search well in one place to hold off the vertical search engines chipping away at their enormous share of search. This delicious pie chart from Search Engine Land shows Google’s share of the
Still, YouTube and now Hulu have carved out a very successful niche in video search, helped in YouTube’s case by a strong social media component of the experience (Of course this led giant Pac-Man Google to eat the flashing YouTube dot). People looking for jobs still gravitate to Monster and CareerBuilder. For financial market search, Yahoo’s Yahoo Finance portal is still a top destination.
Google has tried to get in on this but other than Google Maps it’s hard to find really successful integration of vertical search into their core search model. Google Finance for instance might as well be in deep search considering how far back in the site it is.
Google still serves the core search experience so well that other sites have had to find a magic bullet to wriggle into the consciousness of most users. Neither pipl nor Local.com have delivered on a level that will drive users to abandon Google yet for their types of search, even if other sites have. However Local.com is adding more features like user-generated reviews and ratings, upping the interactive search experience that serves vertical engines so well. If they can pull in users from Google Local then another one of SearchViews predictions for 2008 will have come true: “Search gets truly social and smaller engines get a chance to shine.” After all, we clearly got the following prediction right back in December ‘07: “Pipl.com will freak people out.”
Topics: Google, Online Video, Reprise Media, Search: Innovations, Search: Vertical, Search: Video, Social Media, Yahoo! |