While I was away on holiday vacation, I read two articles about so-called "Google killers" – an overused catch-phrase that should affect more people as partially ridiculous.
(Consider earlier recipients of the title, Teoma (here and here), Quaero (here), Baidu (here), and even Microsoft’s Live.com (here), and… you get the point.)
And again this month, still none of these new search engine ideas are novel, or novel enough to be called a "Google killer". To me this idea sounds like someone inventing a new elixir and calling it the "Coke killer”, or an operating system and calling it the "Windows killer." After all, even Pepsi hasn’t put Coke out of business, as thorough as their competition and advertising may be.
This week’s entrant to the long line of "killers" is Search Wikia, created by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. It is intended to be a
"people-powered search engine" that taps into the essence of Wikipedia, meaning user controlled content.
A volunteer force like this has been utilized before and became an albatross for . Besides, a search engine with user controlled content sounds like it could quickly become a spam magnet.
Next to throw down the gauntlet is Powerset. Their innovative technology claim is that a user can type a search query in "natural language." Sorry, Powerset, but Ask beat you there by about six years.
The other problem Powerset faces is that people do not search in natural language sentences anymore, which is part of the reason Ask re-branded away from their "natural language" search feature. It’s still there; they just don’t tout it anymore. Why? Because users have long been trained to search with
keywords. Powerset would first have to un/re-train this now natural behavior, and then demonstrate it’s more relevant than Google. But that’s not stopping one of its founders, Steve Newcomb, from saying that Powerset could "become the next Google."
Lest I be a stick in the mud, I’m not decrying the ambitious attempts of these upstart engines; I’m questioning the rave surrounding them. Such claims tell me that the product is focused on the competition. The best products, the ones that truly succeed, focus on the customer.
Don’t tell me who you want your new shiny search engine to topple in a few years, tell me why it’s useful to me (and my clients) right now.
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