My secret plan to defeat Google
What is your favorite search engine? Ok, let me guess… they are plenty of them…
But Google is the top player for years. Why? What’s so special about Google? Can we use alternatives?
What made Google success?
- Google gives relevant results: what you are looking for is on its top 5 links
- It’s free! It seems silly but would you pay to use Google search? Maybe…
- Its minimalist interface. Simple, efficient, I like it… you too!
This is not a surprise if accuracy is the top criteria.
But anyone should be aware about Google’s tricks to give you the best results. Among others:
- Page ranking: a page is preferred if many other websites are referring to it, easy
- Crowdsourcing: top pages are also the most visited
- Search history: Google uses your previous search criteria to refine new results
What’s wrong with Google?
Money time
Unfortunately, everything in this world is about money…
By the way, do you know how Google makes money? With auctions! Literally you can pay to get a better ranking for specific keywords
How much for a single click? It could be more than £33 for instance if you selected the word “Insurance”. It could be even more with few keywords in the same query
This system is a bit unfair because the end user have absolutely no feedback about the underlying mechanism. We have no idea if a highest bid can spoil the ranking
Lack of transparency, we deserve another search engine
New habits, new paradigm
While dealing with internet in your daily life, very often a browsing session start on a smartphone.
This devices are amazingly improving, but what about your daily search engine?
How often do you browse beyond the first results’ page? Have you ever used this “lucky” button?
My feeling is that many people (including me) are using Google the wrong way
In general, we have very precise questions and a quick look on Google will give you the answer in few clicks.
Few clicks? Yes! Google gives you a full page of links with textual context but our jugement and amazing intuition will still select THE good one
The solution?
A new search engine!
This search engine should answer precise questions and give only ONE result (the good one would be appreciated)
The result might be a word, a name, a number, a photo, maybe a short sentence, few words that’s it
Imagine, if we could just ask through vocal recognition:
- How old is Barack Obama? -> 52
- What is the French word for « fish »? -> Poisson
- What does the Eiffel tower look like? -> <picture>
Can we do that? Of course!
1997:
Deep Blue, a powerful computer from IBM, was beating the world chess champion Garry Kasparov
2011:
IBM Watson program is playing successfully at Jeopardy! Here
Siri can arrange your meetings and interact with all the applications on the phone
Akinator can guess the character you are thinking by asking few questions
Trust me, this kind of search engine is coming and it is coming fast
Sate of the art
Many websites and companies are already working for years on such engine
I submitted my three questions to one of them:
Got the three right answers:
- How old is Barack Obama?
- What is the French word for « fish »?
- What does the Eiffel tower look like?
AMAZED !!!
Follow next blog post “Let’s do it!”
Sources:
- http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/science-behind_watson.shtml
- http://www.wordstream.com/articles/what-is-google-adwords
- http://www.wordstream.com/articles/google-earnings