After successfully killing the headline last week (kinda), Lewis suggested I try killing something each week – I think he just wants me to post about “what i killed today” and let’s not mention 90 Day Jane…
Anyway, this week I thought I’d kill Google.
I got thinking about the new search landscape reading Doug Sherrets excellent interview with Google’s Marissa Mayer a few weeks ago, as well as general day-to-day chat here at Shiny Red and work for Yell.com. Doug’s piece focussed on social search – any search aided by a social interaction or a social connection – an area of hot debate.
Even for an avid Google fan it’s nice to see dents in their dominance, and at present social search is that. After years of being the one-stop search shop the strength of Facebook and concerns about privacy – how much Google knows if they save our searches to help us search better – have opened more of us up to the evolving nature of search and the advantage of specialist search engines.
As discussed in The Guardian this morning, Google hasn’t absorbed everything, we continue to use the expertise of Yell.com for local business, Linked In to find old colleagues, Wikipedia for instant detail, and more recently Mahalo or Clusty for more organic, quirky results.
The internet is rewarding when humans find humans so I’m not remotely killing Google. It’s a fantastic and very human company full of cute projects and little secrets – if one company is going to dominate the web I’m happy for it to be Google. But it’s great to see exciting niche players holding their ground and raising the quality and importance of their search specialism to keep pace with the standard Google continues to set.
Apologies for the previous attempt at a comment. That was an accident.
By the way, cheers for referencing my blog.
No worries, I thought SearchMash was interesting – thanks for drawing my attention to it!