The Final Question

By: Charles Knight

When Issac Asimov, the great science fiction author, was asked which of his many stories his favorite was, he replied, "The Last Question." In that short story, a couple of scientists are talking, and it occurs to one of them that the Sun, the source of their warmth and energy, will eventually die out.  Having conquered space travel, their plan is to simply move on to another sun.  But then they realize that
sooner or later, they will all burn out, a condition known as entropy. So, they ask their super computer this question, "Can entropy be reversed?" For a humanist, this is the Ultimate Question.  If you want the answer, you'll have to read the story.

In our lifetime, we have a different Ultimate Question, and that is, "Can Google be defeated?"  Hitwise just published their September 2008 results. Microsoft's MSN Live was down (In US market share, compared to September 2007), Yahoo! was down, Ask.com was down, and the Alternative Search
Engines were down. Google simply filled the empty space. Can this trend be halted?

Will Microsoft's "you search, we pay" program work?  Will Powerset turn things around?  And at Yahoo!, will their new BOSS program halt their decline?  Can anything save Ask.com?  And above all, what about the Alternative Search Engines?  If they are so numerous and so superior to old-fashioned Google keyword search, why is their slice of the pie shrinking too?

The answer to this last question is that there are "too many choices."  As noted in my last essay, we have discovered not dozens of alternatives to Google, not hundreds, but thousands.  Users cannot avail themselves of search engines that they have never seen or heard of.  There are too many.  As each one fights for users, users return again and again to that which is familiar to them, and that is Google.

I also argued in my first essay that there is no one "Google-killer."  The alternative search engines are superior to Google mainly in one aspect per project.  Attempts like Cuil's are unlikely to ever succeed.  Imagine the almost unimaginable head start that Google has on it's own turf, the algorithm that they have fine tuned over a decade by the best minds, their near limitless resources, and the mind boggling infrastructure. 

And yet there is hope.

Google's Achilles'heel, as Sramana Mitra and other bloggers have surmised, is the Vertical Search Engines.  The very ones we talked about in the last essay; People Search engines; Job Search; Health Search; Travel, and many, many more.  Each has designed a way to drill for just the best results and to present them in the best possible way (and not as ten blue links!).  And yet Google is used by more people than ever!

Just as the computers in Asimov's story has to ponder for centuries over the question of reversing entropy, we at AltSearchEngines have been pondering day after day, search engine after search engine, about this perceived vulnerability of Google's.  The answer?  The Vertical Search Engines (VSE) must be combined under one homepage.  They must replace their dozens of cryptic names with generic labels ("Job," "Health," "News," etc.), and they must move beyond the Meta Search model to the newer Virtual User Interfaces (VUI).  This is the direction that the Alts must take. A completely new, cooperative homepage paired with a fabulous design.  Regardless of their need, this is where users would learn to come when they had a specific need and wanted, and would be rewarded with, superior results.

Finally, this new homepage would also have easy access to a fast keyword search.  It can incorporate a Google-like option, but Google cannot incorporate every single vertical without alienating their users.  So that's the formula that we have arrived at: FoS = VSE + VUI.  The Future of Search equals the
Vertical Search Engines plus a Virtual User Interface.

Trust me.

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