Google's future and why we should care

Quote :

I HAD LUNCH TODAY WITH Grant Ryan from Eurekster, whose swicki technology aims to enable the long tail of vertical search. Meanwhile, thanks to AltSearchEngines, I now know that there are search engines that find words within songs, or speak the results, or launch from within another application, or provide two-dimensional navigable tag clouds. On Tuesday, InfoWorld published a piece by Ephraim Schwartz called "The Demise of Google." His basic premise? Verticals, with the capability of going into much greater depth on a given niche topic, could represent a serious challenge to the search giant.

So is Schwartz right? Will Google's downfall come not from some upstart building a better mousetrap, but from a change in the way people approach search in the first place? I've set out to paint a picture of a world of predominantly vertical search.

Read the Media Post story. Incidently, when I loaded the page, it was crawling with Yahoo! ads... Go figure

Why does Google matter to newspapers? Because the digital age is upon us and we should be rejoicing. We're not longer limited to our geographical location for readership. A good story with wide-base appeal can go global in a matter of hours or even minutes. But in order for the world to find your great story, it'll need to be crawled by Google.

Modern search engines are no longer limited to keywords. Remember those long meta tags with search terms? No longer. Spiders crawl pages for the actual text, which means that every last word your write and publish on the net will be searchable. Thumbs up, because that's a huge leap in readers ability to find your stories.

Quote :

It would limit discovery. We go to verticals when we know what we want, but the very nature of discovery includes the element of surprise. This isn't to say that discovery doesn't happen with verticals, but the possibilities are confined to within your pre-defined niche.

Do you recall the days of the old Yahoo! categories? I was building my own sites at the time and trying to categorize a pre-med anatomy study site was a little rough. Should I put it under education? Science?

Is this the future we want? How does the Google paradigm serve you, if at all? Do you hope to see something else on the horizon?