Beyond the Valley of the Google Search Dolls
Why is Internet search so important to Google and the other search engine companies?
Seems like a dumb question, right? Search is important because it is the way to find targeted information on the Web. This importance to users allows search engine companies such as Google to accomplish two things:
Attract a huge number of people to the company Web site
Correlate the contents of the site (via search results and/or sponsored links) with the individual interests of the users
In other words, to companies such as Google, search is the feature used to "seduce" users into the Valley of the Dolls, meaning viewing (and hopefully clicking) targeted ads.
But searching is only one way to find things. To use the analogy of finding information in a book, searching is like using the book's index to find something. With both online search and the book's index, the user "runs" a query against a list of keywords. In real life, there are other effective ways to find information in a book: you can inspect the Table of Contents, browse the book, use a third-party concordance that points to information ("Cliff's Notes"), or even read it cover-to-cover, taking notes all the while, creating your own concordance. (See Part III of Building Research Tools with Google for more commentary on index searching as opposed to other information-gathering methodologies.)
With Google's quarterly report yesterday, it is becoming apparent that the Google site will not be as important as a revenue source going into the future. Affiliate revenue (from the AdSense / AdWords programs) is nudging upwards towards 50% of all revenue. In time, it will certainly over take the sponsored-link revenue from Google's own site. While the off-site revenue is dependent on Google's technology, it is not at all dependent on search, or on visitors to the Google home page.
This implies that companies such as Google can no longer define themselves as "search" companies. Not that Google ever has: with its usual accuracy and grandiosity it has more spoken of "information."
One arena Google and the other search engines have already played in is presenting access to information via directories (technically, taxonomies that classify information). This is the correlative of the TOC of a book.
Google uses the Open Directory Project for its raw taxonomic information presented in the Google Directory. (Other search engines such as Yahoo also use the Open Directory info either in whole or part in their directories.)
While the Google Directory is useful for some research purposes (and the Open Directory a good place to list your site if you want search engine coverage), its importance is diminished by the generic and watered-down nature of both the information and its structuring. Ultimately, drilling-down through a taxonomy proves for the most part to be a cumbersome way to find specific information on the Web, although it can be a decent way to get understanding about a general area of interest.
So what lies beyond the Valley of the Search Dolls? Stay tuned to the Googleplex Blog...
Posted by Harold Davis at February 3, 2005 09:31 AM
