392 Googles But What About Search?

According to this list, the vastness and variety of the Goog’s operations since two Stanford students formed a private company 11 years ago is nothing short of jaw-droppingly impressive. Not content with being the most visited site on earth and dominating the online advertising market to the tune of tens of billions, the company has branched into hundreds of directions, offering free products and services to the hundreds of millions of people who visit every day, several times a day.

Some of it is rather impressive.  Some of it is not.  But the core product that Google offers is Search.  It is the moneymaker it shakes to such profitable effect that it has become a vast conglomerate of innovative, disruptive and extremely well-funded start-ups that are changing the way we do business and interact with each other.  We use Analytics for our sites, Alerts to keep abreast of goings-on in the industry, Maps to get to our meetings on time, YouTube to keep us entertained.  This post is being written in Google Docs, the time spent on it organised in Google Calendar.

But most of all, we use Google Search, and we can’t help but think that all these “innovations” are actually distracting from the core product when it is needed most.  Data and information are being produced at a rate far greater than that which we can consume and make sense of.  The once ethereally minimalist presentation of Google Search Results now yields a mess.  News items take more and more precedence at the top, once textual results now have thumbnail snapshots of each site, realtime search results appear in a box halfway down the page, image and video results are thrown into the mix, related searches at the bottom.  And this is just on the universally coveted Page 1 that most site owners set as their moonshot goal.

In the first week of December alone, the company has: redesigned its iconic homepage; integrated realtime content into its main search results and into its Finance pages; placed geo-Tweets into its Maps applications; launched a new version of Analytics and its API; updated how news publishers feature their content; unveiled its own Dictionary; outlined its own DNS standards; unveiled Goggles; and launched it’s Chrome browser for Mac.

It may be a tacit admission that Google itself does not know how to make sense of the exponentially-increasing information being produced.  It can no longer offer the Zen-like experience of finding content, just more options for splicing it up. Top Tens, Best in Show, Page 1 – we’ve always had an affinity with ranking systems, but it seems less and less like the ideal solution to the problem.  When analysing a spreadsheet with 200,000 rows of data, you don’t get an understanding of it from the first or largest 10 or 20 items.  You analyse the whole, build up graphical representations, find patterns across the set to inform. How best to analyse 39 million results for “Barack Obama”?

Perhaps their solution is to just tie us into as many other sticky products and services so we ignore the fact that its competitors are actually delivering better search results and better click-rates to advertisers these days.  The new operating systems for desktop and mobile, the new browsers, the integrated realtime search, may all appear to be game-changing innovations from the market leader, but really it seems more like an unfocused monopolistic land grab.  It swoops in on entire sectors, swallowing promising newbies whole by making offers shareholders can’t refuse.

Google may well succeed, but at what cost to innovation in search?