Yahoo Search

I would still consider myself more of a "Google Guy" than a "Yahoo User" but I must admit the recent upgrade to Yahoo's search feature is pretty cool.

Yahoo now suggests ways to phrase a search request as a user types into the query box, providing a list of related concepts and produces links to related photos, videos and music on the main results page.

I might actually use Yahoo now. You know, if the Google site is down or something.

Search and the long tail

A recommended read about search, user-generated content and the Long Tail.

Via Bazaarblog

The future of search

Insightful summary of a presentation from Marissa Mayer of Google on where search is headed. Especially interesting was this note:

"According to Mayer, someday in the future Google could automatically search content in all languages and present all the translated results to the user on the same page, regardless of language!"

Wow.

Discovery: The next big thing

Ten years ago few would have predicted the 800 pound gorilla that search has become. Back then, we had Hotbot and Lycos, Webcrawler and Infoseek, Yahoo and Google. None with a clear idea of how to make any money. And most websites back then didn't have (or need) a robust site-search solution. We "surfed" the Web, skimming along the surface. And we were happy.

But much has changed in ten years. Today, Google makes billions serving up ads based on search keywords. Yahoo claims to be "the world's most visited homepage." And enterprise search is now a huge trend as large organizations struggle to organize and access their vast collections of digital information.

Search is and will continue to be very important. But a new trend is also emerging: Discovery.

I think of it this way:

• Search helps you find things you are looking for
• Discovery helps you find things you are interested in, but that you didn't even know existed
  

The leader in this area is a site called StumbleUpon. It's basically an application that recommends interesting sites for you based on your interests and the votes of other, similar StumbleUpon users. Today StumbleUpon released StumbleThru, which will surface the best content on popular Websites - "the best music artists on MySpace, the best photos on Flickr, the most relevant articles on Wikipedia. It's kind of a way to discover interesting information without actually having to search for it."

Google likes this idea so much they have created a similar "recommendation engine" called Google Dice.

Sites like Digg and Reddit offer discovery through their communities. They "crowdsource" the discovery of what's new and interesting. Newsvine and NowPublic do the same for news.

As the Internet continues to grow in size, complexity and importance, the act of discovery will likely play an integral role in how we make sense of it all.

How Google is like the dictionary

I remember an episode of M*A*S*H from my youth in which Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) is being interviewed by a war documentarian. One of the questions is "what's your favorite book?" Hawkeye, in his smart-alecky way, answered that he would choose the dictionary because "you know, it has all the other books in it."

In the same way I think if I were asked what my favorite website is, my answer would have to be what George Bush dubbed "The Google." Not for how it looks, but for what it does and what it provides me. In a fraction of a second. For free.

Now I realize there are other, arguably better search engines, and not everything is findable through Google. But our ability to find and access information - facts, statistics, opinions, images - is greater now than at any other point in history. And to me, no other site exemplifies that achievement of mankind more than Google.

With hundreds of millions of searches per day, I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment.