In the old days of the Internet search engine business you had a vast multitude of places to visit. There was Excite, Yahoo!, WebCrawler, Lycos, and many others. You had the search engine aggregators, such as Dogpile and HotBot.
What you didn’t have was a single source to use to search the whole of the web. When Google came along they created a way to analyze the relationships between pages to produce more useful results. The search results were no longer just a mishmash based on how many times a word existed in a page, now the results had a certain relevancy.
Then Google added advertising into the mix, providing users with a way to find products or vendors that had some correlation with the keywords entered. This was a great tool for the layperson and researcher alike. Along the way Google has added shopping results, images, news, videos, and maps. However they seem to have forgotten their core product: a clean, easy-to-use, clutter-free search engine.
The latest improvements, if you can call them that, are the inclusion of web history and “real-time” results. In addition they have added the shopping, news, and related searches to the main content of the search results.
While I was initially disturbed by the addition of Google’s sponsored links, ad-words and ad-sense programs, I know that they are a for-profit company. They have a need to sell a product of some sort in order to continue to provide me with the search results that I know and love. Unfortunately they seem to have forgotten why most of us came to Google in the first place: pure, unadulterated search results. We wanted to find things, and Google became the best tool to help us accomplish this task.
Now some people may find it immensely satisfying to see a stream-of-consciousness included in the results. In the blogpost Relevance meets the real-time web, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow (and according to the New York Times, the master Google’s ranking algorithm), introduced us to a new feature that “bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web.” The post goes on to say that “Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.” There is are two embedded YouTube videos that give you an example or two of the end product as well as fanfare from the Search Event presentation from the Computer History Museum.
At the end of the post is the following statement
As we’ve written before, search is still an unsolved problem and we’re committed to making it faster and easier for people to access a greater diversity of information, delivered in real-time, from across the web. I’m tremendously excited about these significant new real-time search features.
The problem with the above statement is that with each successive “improvement” Google has moved further and further from the core product that brought most of us to their door step. Don’t misunderstand me, I love information and being connected. I have accounts on Google Voice, Google Wave, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and several other social networking and informational services. I have an iPhone that I constantly check. I watch CNN, read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. I have several e-mail accounts and I check them all with regularity. I even work in the Information Technology Division at a Valdosta State Unviersity. I am not some luddite who is afraid that technology is going to be the utter ruination of our civilized society.
What I don’t like is that for some reason all of the new “features” have found their way into the clean, pristine waters that I used to love to drink from with each and every search. Now the results are polluted with a non-stop flow of Twitter and Facebook results, their clear surface marred with jarring image, news and shopping results content.
There is a reason that the links exist at the top of the Google page. If you want images, news or shopping, then click on those links. Why do I need to have predictive text attempt to steer me into popular areas of search terms when typing in the desired keywords to summon to me the knowledge that I seek? Is there a place for all of these features? Sure, but at least give us a way to turn them all off.
When I want to search for images, I click the images link. When I want shopping choices, I click the shopping link. When I want Twitter, I will check TweetDeck for the things that I follow. When I want news, I will surf CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or even possibly Fox News.
When I want clear, clean search results, I use Google’s search engine, and make no mistake, that is all I want from the search engine. Don’t force me to try and use other services that provide inferior results, just give me the option to turn all the extras off.
Please, I beg of you: give me back my search!
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