I could have written “thoughts for the weekend” but decided that sounded too intense. No, let’s take this Friday to sit a moment and look over some more or less random tidbits.

Hmmm….

After a week of doing this and that in search I can’t shake off the feeling that something’s afoot in search engine land.

Different from ranking shakeup complaints, there seems to be a growing discontent, some kind of unease with Google.

Google got kicked for promoting their own services but ever since they’ve defaulted to personalized search results people in the industry seem to feel… bugged. Enough so for Matt Cutts to address the privacy issues. Nice try. John Andrews has a perfect rebuttal for what he classifies as a “hook humility post”.

Love Affair

Of course people won’t switch search engines *snap* just like that. And why should they? The 3 major search engines all deliver more or less the same basic usable result set with which the majority of users can get going.

And the 3 of them all track, store and analyze user data. There’s no escape.

To switch brands you need a pressing reason, a pressing need. They need something compelling, something unique.

Google jumped into the market at a time search was crappy, I mean really crappy. Their unique promise was to deliver relevant results. So what are others going to do now? Advertise that they also deliver relevant results?

No, search engines now have to differentiate themselves by something else than search.

Betsy Aoki, Program Manager, Live Search, did a great write-up, Search is a Love Problem, which includes a nice stab (”search history gone wild”) and seems to have us peek into the Live search kitchen where they prepare future recipes.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not what the search engine thinks is the most relevant answer. It’s what a human brain thinks is the most relevant answer. Humans make the queries, and humans make the answers. In the end, the user experience is what matters. And humans determine the user experience.

That’s why community features and approaches are so important. A search engine isn’t going to collate information from several web sites into a “how-to” because it’s never made bath fizzies/bombs before. A search engine hasn’t lived through the experience of where to put aging parents who can still get around but might fall down with no one to help. And even if the math is perfect, only so many answers fit on that first page, and there are many more types of people in the world who may disagree with the results.

Too many doors

Day before yesterday I wrote about how your site needs a door.

By offering free Web-based productivity applications, Google is looking for an additional vehicle for advertising revenue and trying to distract Microsoft from focusing on its own core search advertising business […]

Despite reports to the contrary, Google isn’t going after Microsoft as much as Microsoft is gunning for Google, he said.

“Microsoft is clearly going after the advertising world” and has pledged to invest $2 billion to do so, […]

Microsoft has not been able to put the pieces of its media business together, said Alan Weiner, a managing vice president at Gartner. “They have a ton of piece-parts and they’re looking for a cohesive strategy to come together,” […]
– Analysts: Microsoft’s after Google’s ad business

Although everything in that part is true, the part that got my attention was the “ton of piece-parts”: too many doors.

It’s not just Microsoft, Google suffers from this in its own right, but it is very apparent with them. They have overlapping projects and products, all of which are scattered around the web. Finding anything on the Microsoft site itself is already a project but when you realize they put “stuff” on subdomains of live.com as well…

What they need is a way to organize and display data and status to users. Think dashboard. I would hate to see them lose out with great products such as Windows Live Writer simply because no-one has any idea where it is or that it is.

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