Searching for the New Search

The meme of Google's sputtering search product has certainly taken off, and that of course brings the apologistas out of the woodwork - one of the most amusing is this one on MediaBeat, which somewhat circularly argues that:

I saw it coming first:

I can only ask: What took so long? I first blogged about Google’s increasingly terrible search results in October 2007. If you search for any topic that is monetizable, such as “iPod Connectivity” or “Futon Filling”, you will see pages and pages of search results selling products and very few that actually answer your query. In contrast, if you search for something that isn’t monetizable, say “bridge construction,” it is like going 10 years back into a search time machine.

You are all wrong, Google is working on it - but they can't win

But here’s what these late-blooming critics miss: Yes, Google’s search results do indeed suck. But Google’s fixing it.

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The folks at Google have not been asleep at the wheel. They are well aware that their search results were being increasingly gamed by search marketers and that this was not a battle they were going to win. The answer has been to dump the famous blue links on which Google built its business.

Umm..actually, most observers have been noticing this for some time, certainly since 2006 when we first wrote on New Search - the reason the meme has taken off like wildfire now is that it has got noticeably worse since 2009! Anyway, the argument is that Gooogle is now putting in Niche Search un-noticed by all us dumbos, so even though its "not a battle they could win", they have in fact won:

But they have won anyway

Over the past couple of years, Google has progressively added vertical search results above its regular results. When you search for the weather, businesses, stock quotes, popular videos, music, addresses, airplane flight status, and more, the search results of what you are looking for are presented immediately. The vast majority of users are no longer clicking through pages of Google results. They are instantly getting an answer to their question.

Google is in the unique position of being able to learn from billions and billions of queries what is relevant and what can be verticalized into immediate results. Google’s search value proposition has now transitioned to immediately answering your question, with the option of sifting through additional results. And that’s through a combination of computing power and accumulated data that competitors just can’t match.

For those of us who have watched this transition closely and attentively over the past few years, it has been an amazing feat that should be commended. So while I am the first to make fun of Google’s various product failures, Google search is no longer one of them.:

So, all the current people who are seeing a problem are clearly wrong, its gone now - move on, nothing to see here. Unfortunately for this argument, SEO Watch did a survey at the same time and found that (surprise) there was a problem, Bing getting better results by 63 to 52 points.

There is the start of a good debate for New Search aficionados on Stowe Boyd's post here:

We will find everything through social relationships: what washing machine to buy, or the best Thai restaurant in Beacon NY, or the company that makes the horizontal corduroys. people that care about these issues, and to who we matter, will share meaning with us: they have beliefs that they can justify, also called knowledge.

Google is only the echo of our linking behavior, a second-order derivative of our combined gestures. But generally, we would be happier with fewer results from trusted sources, and the rise of social tools makes that almost as fast as Google search.