Thursday, May 21, 2009

Can google be dislodged?

I like this article which details a few points on how google can be dislodged.

My opinion:
1) Real-Time news and search [think #awaresg, localized, real-time citizen journalism]
2) Getting actual answers [Wolfram Alpha]
3) Image and Spatial search: The world's information is not always going to be in text. When my generation grows up (haha..) we aren't going to settle for stuffy essays and journals where you have to pay extra to publish diagrams
[ironically, MIT's journal Presence on ... (drumroll) Virtual environments (read: 3-D environments) charges extra for diagrams (2-D) to be published http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/pres]
We're going to use videos, slides, pictures, voice and 3-D spaces. (make your own sculpture/ virtual room... i remember my balsa wood model of Raffles Place from primary school) In addition, phones will allow us to capture our surroundings and transmit them to friends. Or at least as stripped down idea of the space. [hmmm.. is anyone doing this yet? its just about putting 3-D markup languages (think HTML for 3-D) and some sensors (eg. GPS, 2-D to 3-D recognition software) together.

Joe (my twin) told me he was thinking about "What is the next news media?"
I told him it was the wrong question. The right one was "what is the next way we are going to communicate?" News is only an application of that larger question. but i think we were agreed that news is not just newspapers. Twitter is now a news source too, and so is citizen journalism.

Anyway.. i'm writing alot as usual... (yes i'm long winded).
Here's the snippets from the article that i liked and the link is at the bottom.


"The best way to approach Google search is probably not by taking on its main strengths: its ubiquity and its broad horizontal sweep." - Erika Morphy (article's author)

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"The way to successfully compete with a large player like Google is by specializing in an area where you have specific domain expertise and where presentation of results is substantially different than what you would expect from general search results," Mike Janes, CEO of FanSnap, told the E-Commerce Times

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"As Twitter has shown, Google has some vulnerability when it comes to real-time search," Marc Engelsman, VP of client services at Digital Brand Expressions, told the E-Commerce Times.

"Google is working on this and just upgraded their algorithm last week," Engelsman pointed out, "and while Google News is pretty good for 'news,' it is still not so good at being a go-to resource for less newsy searching for what's happening this very minute."

Yahoo or Microsoft may try to exploit this vulnerability -- and if they do, if it will be a game-changer, he predicted. "People seem comfortable using alternative resources as they need to -- like switching to Wikipedia when looking for certain types of information.

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Google has built a huge moat in the search space, so any challenger will need to make mammoth strides in improving the search experience in order to take any of its market share, Joshua D. Barsch, CEO of StraightForward Media, told the E-Commerce Times.
"If Google has any vulnerability, it's in the enormous volume of results it provides, which can overwhelm some users," Barsch


Original Article:
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/67124.html

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