Search: Go High or Go Home
In following up on an earlier post on the search for search’s Holy Grail, here’s a perfect example of why it’s so hard for new players to establish a search foothold.
Last night, I installed SemantiFind, a plug-in for Firefox that piggybacks on Google that “enhances your current search engine experience. It saves you time and finds more meaningful results”.
In theory, it sounds intriguin. In practice, not so much.
The biggest problem is it hijacks Google by adding a weird “x” in the search bar so you can’t modify or change a search query easily. This one little thing was so annoying, I immediately uninstalled SemantiFind.
My frustration with SemantiFind (which appeared at DEMO earlier this week) put the spotlight on one of the biggest challenges facing new players in the search market: the expectations set by Google are so high in terms of simplicity and effectiveness that failing to meet this benchmark out of the box can doom a new player.
Look at what happened to Cuil, which debuted amid bullish promises that it indexed 120 billion documents - three times more than Google. Sadly, Cuil stumbled out of the gate. It was savaged so badly that it may never recover - something you could describe as being “Flocked” given how Flock’s alpha browser was a major disaster.
Technorati Tags: google, semantifind, search
