Have search engines had their day
January 18, 2012
Intro
The web is constantly changing, evolving - it seems now that it's almost a given that people will be using a high speed connection (relative to a decade ago) allowing richer content and services to flood our browsers.
One major factor in web usage is the concept of an 'account' or 'profile' used to identify a individual user. Ranging from online shopping sites which require authentication to associate a user with their address and credit cards, to social networking sites where the entire purpose of using the site is build up a 'profile' to access data which is relevant to you.
This relationship between person and personalised data is not a new concept; loyalty cards such as those in supermarkets track your spending habits and offer complementary services or offers tailored to you personally.
This concept has been well adopted via the medium of the internet, many retail sites offer suggestions such as 'users who bought this, also bought this' to try and link together your interests with their products to increase sales.
Media sites such as YouTube offer 'related videos' after playing a video, online radio and podcast sites all try to tempt you to listen to more and more content after they know you like one thing. Sites are beginning to offer achievements and awards as bragging rights, bringing web usage into the realms of competition and 'gaming' in general.
Even search engines such as Google are supposedly providing tailored search results based on your past search history, giving distinct results for the same search terms, between users. Could this heavy tailoring of information lead us to a point where searching is a thing of the past?
The end of the search engine?
Whilst I'm not suggesting that Google will die anytime soon, I do suggest that for the more tech savvy users, we are almost reaching a point where your online presence is so well established that all you have to do to gather all your daily information is log on to your favourite sites and check 'your account'.
In fact, sites such as Klout, have actively made a business out of monitoring and plotting people's online presence and systems like OAuth have made it easier to have create your 'profile' in multiple different sites without needing to maintain a small phone book full of usernames and passwords!
From a personal perspective, I often find myself doing a kind of routine of GMail > Twitter > Facebook > Stack Overflow > BBC News > LinkedIn , for example, all of these are sites I have accounts for, and all of these are sites which have offered me options to tailor the site content to my needs.
Content I wish to view outside of these key sites is 90% of the time driven by links contained within them. Articles, videos, other friends, pictures are all presented to me in a filtered, relevant manner, nearly entirely negating the need for using a search engine.
Even outside of the major sites, online purchases are made from retailers I'm familiar with or have been recommended via a friend, normally via a link on a social networking site. Amazon, Ebuyer etc again are all sites I'd visit for products before tapping the item into a search engine.
I'm certainly not suggesting there isn't a huge demand for search engines still, merely that from a personal point of view I find myself increasingly being driven by 'suggestions' rather than blind luck and few keywords!
Conclusion
Search engines are here to stay, but is their usage starting to head more towards certain patterns of usage, in that it's more to find a named source of information which we trust rather than information itself out of context?
If you Googled 'Ford Escort Owners Club' would you continue to use a search engine once you'd found the club website? or would you just go directly there? Once you have located the information and satisfied you key requirements for daily usage, do you need to search anymore?
Whilst still a key component for research, comparison and gaining information on the unknown, are we getting to stage where the proportion of 'unknown' is significantly less. To a point where it's more the exception than the norm?
I'd be very interested to hear any opinions on this topic, if anyone else is feeling like me on this one, or whether more users than I believe, are still using Google as their start point for everything, do get in touch.