What a bad night. We flew from Grand Junction, Colorado to Denver and then to Seattle. We kept hearing about a storm coming through Denver, so we were worried we would be stuck (again) in DIA but luckily got on the flight with no problems. Unfortunately, it snowed here in Seattle and when it snows here, people go absolutely crazy. They don’t know how to drive, the roads are all pretty icy because of the climate, and it’s a recipe for disaster. In this case, it meant that Ciara and I had to wait in a 300-person taxi line at SeaTac for 3 hours. I wish I was kidding.
But, the long flight did give me a chance to read John Battelle’s The Search (I know, I’m late). I wanted to grab Robert’s book, Naked Conversations, but the small Borders in Grand Junction didn’t have it.
I was impressed by The Search. I always enjoy technology histories and while John does a good job of covering the search industry, the profile of Google is a good one. I came away thinking that Google is still a very vulnerable company. I think back to my own search history - WebCrawler, Yahoo, AltaVista, Google, and how quickly I made the switch when something better came along. While Google seems to be more sticky than previous search engines, SEO spam and people who want to game the system will always be a threat and if the results are tainted, I’ll jump to the next best engine.
The other thing I noticed is how far we still have to come in Search Google has done a great job of collecting and cataloging information, but we’re still trying to find it in a pretty rudimentary way. There’s something to be said for a more human search experience. I’m not necessarily advocating something like Ms. Dewey, but I think Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) could have a big place in search. What if users could leverage RIA technologies to visualize their results? Move the results into a 3D space where the most recent documents are first and the older ones are farther away? It may seem like bloated eye-candy, but humans perceive things in a 3D world, and treating results as objects that can be manipulated in a way that makes them more meaningful could be a great concept for search.
But, as of right now, Ms. Dewey is much more novelty than functional, and we’re not going to see the end of the single text input box any time soon.
[tags]The Search, John Battelle, Ms. Dewey, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]
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