Searching . . .

Waiting for the next big thing in search engines feels like waiting for the next great revolution in pop music. When something like Google comes along with its concept of using links to and from a site to help rank quality, it feels like everything has changed and the possibilities abound.

But then comes a fallow time. I feel like we have been waiting for the next leap in searching for a while now. Sure, the Big 3 improve a little all the time, but there has been nothing that constitutes a major change in a long time. And they mostly seem to be improving ways to generate ad revenue and be palatable to the Chinese government.

We're still waiting on the next Sex Pistols, the next Nirvana, the next Bob Marley of search engines.

Metasearching sounds good in theory, but in practice I have always found it clumsy. I think one of the challenges of searching the web is getting too much information back - the longer the list of possible sites, the more daunting the work of finding the right one, and the more non-relevant results there will be to sort through. Combining the results of a search from multiple search engines seems to add to the glut rather than refine it.

I also have some specific issues with the way metasearch sites do business. Dogpile, for example, features results from the advertisements on Yahoo and Google not in their advertising section at the top (which is longer than at the Big 3 sites) but in their results. If you read the fine print you can see that a site they are pointing to was taken from "Ads by Yahoo" rather than Yahoo search results.