-
Seeking a perfect search
As ask.com makes a public onslaught against Google under the guise of democratising the world wide web and freeing us all from the virtual shackles of a monopoly, it is interesting to see a spate of new providers attempting to evolve search. The main reason for this is in large part due to the amount of online information growing phenomenally day by day - the quantity of pages Google throws up is soon likely to stretch from here to the moon and back. Some canny developers are therefore catching onto the fact that while Google’s eye is off the ball as it diversifies its offerings, creating more web-based applications in its lab, an opportunity in cyberspace exists.
As Chris Anderson states in his book, The Long Tail, the next generation of web users will have higher demands as they search for more relevant content, more quickly, more succinctly. In a nutshell, more information filtering is needed and how that is presented could change. While every web user is familiar with the simple Google library-style text listings, surely it won’t be long before user-interface
designers get in on the act to produce a new animal such as http://kwmap.net/uk.html and http://www.kartoo.com (pictured above)?Although these new filtering services are not always as accurate in their search results, it provides food for thought that perhaps another innovator is just waiting around the corner. Just type in the word ‘Search’ in Google and the most-widely used search engine provider turns up fourth in their very own listings - poor search engine optimisation or a warning sign?
