Or what comes *after* search? Will there be a next big thing soon, or will we just have to settle for incremental improvements in what we have? With all the new wrinkles of Web 2.0 and social networking, like tagging, are we getting anywhere in improving the online experience? In a Wall Street Journal piece today, I note that not enough people are tagging yet for it to be “worth their while” — because, they say, even the most popular tagging sites such as Del.icio.us and Wink.com and Shadows.com get less than 1% of Google’s monthly traffic. It’s mostly geeks so far. Then there’s the growing problem of people abusing the whole system with tag spamming.
How big a need is there for better search? According to Factiva (a Dow Jones and Reuters company), “the cost of not finding relevant information is staggering.” More than half of all web searches are not successful, they say. They even cite a study by Find/SVP that claims searching but not finding relevant information costs U.S. firms $31 billion in wasted time every year! (Granted, they’re in competition with free search, trying to sell you proprietary search technology.) Another figure comes from the Pew Internet & American Life Project: it says that only 17% of Internet users always get what they’re looking for from an online search engine — meaning 83% don’t! Whatever figure you care to believe, the need is huge. And many companies are at work on that “next big thing” in search (or beyond search) — including a lot of startups you haven’t even heard of yet. [See my previous post about some I’ll be reporting on soon.] There are companies focused on search as it relates to the entire, public world wide web, and others on coming up with better technology for searching private data bases, such as those owned by enterprises or governments. Take, for example, your company’s email store, or other types of massive, textual, unstructured databases. Text analysis or linguistics analysis technology is one interesting area I’m following. More soon.
Meant to also mention this recent announcement: IBM Turns Over Search Project To Open Source Community….”in an effort to spur the growth of the collaborative enterprise search technology.”
And today we learn that Dumbfind.com goes out…with the two-search-box approach. You have to love the name — but one wonders, after reading this piece, how they chose to launch at this point. It’ll be interesting to learn more about their launch strategy. Wonder if blogs were part of it? Shel Israel’s post about launching without traditional PR (which I blogged about earlier) makes a good case for for such a strategy, at least if you’re a Web 2.0 startup.
DumbFind is a Great Search Engine, check out our recent web portal. Sprinko.com is a Fun way to search the web for news, images, articles, encyclopedia, dictionary and videos.