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26 January 2005 Dwim and dwimmerGoogle is trying to be too smart, and failing. A Google search for 'church organist' gives me lots of pages about church organs. That's not what I asked for. A Google search for iWork is stuffed with results in which people proudly proclaim 'I work'. Yes, and so does Bach's organ, but Google doesn't. In fact, its dwimmer is rapidly becoming dweomer. Google achieved market dominance very, very quickly simply by building a better mousetrap than the previous market-leaders (e.g. AltaVista). But in time, someone will come along and build an even better mousetrap, and Google's lead will evaporate just as quickly. Issues like the above, the pollution of the search space by SEO-fuelled aggregator pages, a profusion of marginal product announcements, and myriad usability flaws (especially at Google Groups 2) suggest to me that they have taken their eye off the ball. Scientific American has summarised battlegrounds for the next generation of search engines. The article's full of ideas though comparatively light on analysis. The big advance will come when someone manages to retrofit semantic web parsing to the n million webpages already out there. Though probably not the Semantic Web itself. Clay Shirky is enjoyably scathing on that one. CommentsBlimey. They've actually fixed the iWork 'feature' since I last checked (this weekend)... though the 'church organist' issue still stands. Posted by Richard Fairhurst on 26.1.05 14:46 | |
