Sarah on the State of Search
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006Sarah’s take on the state of search made it’s way onto the Radar blog.
A couple of things I’ve noticed since writing/editing the second edition of the Google Missing Manual earlier this year. Nothing ground-breaking here; more that in aggregate, the observations may spark some interesting conversations.
- As the Web gets bigger, search results contain more irrelevant stuff. In many cases, it’s getting harder to find what you want. Appreciably harder.
- Assuming search winds up lasting 100+ years, it’s still in its infancy. Still, it surprises me that the presentation of Google’s main search results pages barely changed in the two years from one edition of the book to the next. The main difference is that now, onebox results with specialized information appear more frequently (though randomly) at the top of results listing. At this point, I’m ready for a better results interface.
