And Then There Was Google
An article By Unk Coothd
From 1993 until now there have been search engines to help us find what we need on the internet. The first was Archie (short for Archives) and was used to search FTP. Archie was soon followed by Veronica (text search) and Jughead (gopher search). Those of you that are old enough might recognize the Archie cartoon characters here.
Fast forward to September 1998 and Google Inc. open its doors. With search capability far better than any of the existing competition, Google was able to find just about whatever you were looking for.
Now (10 years later) it has become increasingly difficult to find anything. Any search yields hundreds of thousands if not millions of results. Mixed in are tons and tons of garbage sites that have no valid information for you but just want to sell you something. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with selling and marketing on the internet, but, there is so much of it out there today it has become very difficult to find valid information.
The time is here for better search technology. Two of the emerging technologies still rely on search engines like Google.com but have enhanced filtering capabilities. One is community search. One of the co-founders of wikipedia.org Jimmy Wales has started one of the first (if not the first) community search engines called wikia search http://re.search.wikia.com/index.html. While it was still in beta at the time of this post wikia search is already making our search lives easier. What sets wikia search apart is the fact that the community can rate the search returns. What that means to us is that the community can filter out the garbage. The sites with the highest rankings rise to the top so that every first page will contain very relevant search results.
At the time of this post there were already almost 6 million queries and almost 2 million contributions. Anyone can sign up and participate.
The second technology that threatens to filter out the garbage is vertical search engine technology. Vertical search engines will be designed to pertain to a certain areas of interest and will filter out all other search returns. For example, if you are a cook and you want to find a source for your Thanksgiving turkey you type in turkey in the search box at Google.com almost the entire first page is about the country of Turkey. If you were in a cooking vertical search site you would find the first page populated with relevant information about how to find, cook, spice, cut etc… a turkey. This technology, much like the community approach, will require more human intervention.
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