Google Search is broken
Just read a very interesting article on the future of search. The bottom line for me was pretty clear: Google Search is broken. Several of the core principles behind it are now obviously wrong.
Search is not about getting a list of web pages. The structure of online information is much more complex. If you’re looking for some help on a particular Java library, you wouldn’t expect Google to return you a link to every single page of a 50-page online manual: the whole manual is the information unit you’re looking for. If you’re looking for opinions on a new Wii game, you should expect a list of forums, with for each forum, some insight into how many posts refer to the game, what the overall sentiment is, etc. The posts may be on one same web page, or they may not, and this does not matter.
The concept of relevancy is changing. Google’s strengths was to give you the best results quickly. But if you want to know what is being said about a particular brand, product or person - who’s to say which mention is more relevant than the others? Shouldn’t the relevancy of a mention be a subjective mixture of the credibility, reach, and popularity of the mention’s author? It seems impossible to reduce such a mixture into a single number - and wrong to assign such a number to each and every web page.
The Google index proudly boasts of returning you millions of results, but only ever shows you a thousand (quick tests on the News and Blog searches show you that these numbers are misleading). But the key assumption is that only the top results are interesting. Aren’t they all? Don’t most users want to get a complete picture of the information out there, including information from smaller, less ‘relevant’ sources?
Social content evolves, too quickly for a fat search index like Google’s. Google did create separate products for News and Blog searches, and that is revealing about the limitations of their main search index. Besides, Google Blog search is packed with non-blog content, and full of spam.
The future really seems about extracting ‘keyword mentions’ from web pages, as often as possible, then identifying the mentions’ authors and sentiment, aggregating them in various ways, and so on.
You could argue that Google Search answers a different need: it gives a rather static picture of the knowledge accumulated on the web. This may be why, for half of my searches, the first result is from Wikipedia - in which case, do we really need Google in the first place?