Gunning for the Fastest Gun in the West….Google!
It seems that Google has achieved something close to world dominance, and that its various operations, plans and products are issuing in an unstoppable stream. But there are people who have their eyes on the Big G and the eyes are not full of admiration. In fact, they’re sizing Google up for a take-down. According to a very interesting story by Randall Stross in The New York Times for June 24, 2007 which inspired this post, various development teams are concentrating on what they think to be the weak spot in Google’s armor…the search algorithm. That is also the strongest point, so a little bewilderment at the apparent paradox is perhaps in order. And the way into the heart of the Death Star Battlestation is to use…humans! Briefly, the idea is trump Google’s search returns by using editors to refine the content of the database from which search hits are gathered and sent to the user. There are some advantages to this method: humans can detect and kill informercials and other effluvia that have some topical information but are largely sales pitches, and the editors can construct useful subcategories into which the results can be sorted. Editors can also create a basket of quality sources on different topics. This is not really new. In the early days of search enginery, some services were structured around a directory of categories, created and managed by humans. It was a point of pride that no resource be added to the database without some human vetting. Keyword searching was the other, competing architecture, and in time, both methods began to appear on web search services, with the human element going into decline. Now, some developers want to try that human thing again, and some products are emerging onto the market. One drawback, it seems, is that the editors will have to figure out some list of “important” or “frequent” search topics and terms in order for the editors to analyze and classify the results. So, there could be lots of material on the antics of various celebrities and not so much on the Flemish Wool Trade in the Ninth Century. But, you have to start someplace. There is some big money to be made in search, even after Google, and quite a few groups are out to get hold of it. What comes to mind is the pictures of those first scrawny mammals, scurrying around the feet of T. rex and just waiting for their chance. Some of these newcomers are trying to challenge Google on its core competency by designing a better search and ranking algorithm. It’s all early days yet. We shall see.
The new engines include: Hakia, Accoona, Powerset, Squidoo, Sproose, NosyJoe and Mahalo.
New Engines
