Good-bye, Google (Part I)

Last week Google announced they would be personalizing everyone’s searches regardless of whether they were logged in or not. I’m not a privacy nut, but this just seems wrong to me. I know, you can opt-out of the service, but how many people even know their searches are being personalized are are internet savvy enough do it? (Almost anyone who reads this blog probably is, but that’s not to say you’re the average internet user.)

Google news of late has gotten me thinking about search engines and what they’re supposed to do. As I mulled it over, I realized I’m not really interested in which web pages tell me what I want to know, I’m interested in what I want to know. Google only gives specific answers if you ask for something Google Calculator knows how to deal with. (Additionally, I often have the problem that a lot of results Google gives me are irrelevant to my search–many times I cannot even find my search terms on the page using the browser’s Find functionality.)

At the same time, I am starting to be concerned about putting all my eggs in one basket: Google Search, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Maps, the list goes on. Earlier this year, Google broke the internet (which could happen to any search engine) and accidentally shared Google Documents with contacts users hadn’t given permission to access (which could have happened to any online text editing service). Incidents like this are subtle reminders to me that it may not be a good idea to put too much trust in a powerful company.

A testamonial about interviewing for Google changed my perspective on the Mountain View company. The number of questions the interviewers asked that focused solely on advertising revenues (2 out of 4) made me associate Google less with internet services and more with advertising companies like Lamar. It struck me that they’re less interested in providing great products and more interested in providing products that increase their ad revenues, which, while perfectly fine, makes them seem lame.

It hasn’t taken long for me to start relate to articles like this one which question whether Google is friend or foe, and articles like this one and this one sparked my interest in Bing, which I’d played with when it premiered but didn’t find much different from Google. As the second article points out, Bing is starting to provide answers where it can rather than mere links, a tactic Google might avoid, since its business strategy is so wound around advertising revenues. It might not be a good business decision to start giving the answers rather than driving traffic to sites with the answers. While Bing makes its money from advertising, it’s backed by Microsoft, which has a pretty good source of revenue through other means; Google doesn’t.

Those are the high points of my case against Google, the points that have convinced me to start looking at alternatives. I’ve abandoned Google Search (which I’ll discuss in Part II of this post), and my experience with Google Wave lasted all of a week: it sounds cool, and it looks cool, and I want it to be cool, but it’s just not. I’m sticking with GMail and Google Reader for the moment, but when I start a new job in a couple weeks and no longer have wireless during the day, being able to access my RSS feeds on my iPod Touch will be much less important, and I’ll probably switch to a desktop aggregator. In the meantime, GMail is awesome, but I do hope a Google Glitch doesn’t start showing my emails in Google Search results, and if I find a good alternative, I’ll have to seriously consider making the change to it (if you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments).

For a rundown of alternatives to Google Search, jump to Part II of this post.

Bing.com blunder: Page 21 goes blank (FireFox)

Bing.com blanks out at page 21-22 of search results in FireFox.

Take a simple search in bing.com

http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford

This will give you page saying there are 160,000,000 results and you’re being shown 1-20 of them. That’s all fine and dandy but let’s say I want to just flip through the pages a little and see what’s new with Ford.

When you click on the pagination below the URL’s that your going to look something like this…

Page 2: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=6&FORM=PERE

Page 3: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=16&FORM=PERE1

Page 4: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=26&FORM=PERE2

Page 5: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=36&FORM=PERE3

You’ll notice a couple things changing in these urls.  The first should be the “first” GET variable in the URL which appears to be some kind of page offset for the results.

The next is that FORM=PERE business which I’m not sure exactly what it does and it didn’t seem to matter if I removed it from the URL anyway.

The key thing I found was that if you click through the pages until you get to around page 21 or 22 the screen goes completely blank and the magic variable value is changing “?first” to a value that’s greater than or equal to 200.  This seems to only be an issue in Firefox as far as I can tell.

I checked the headers with this and there doesn’t seem to be any significant differences.

$ curl -I http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=16&FORM=PERE4

$ curl -I http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=206&FORM=PERE4

Comment if you have any ideas?

LeapFish

I came across LeapFish this morning. It’s a new search engine that promises to aggregate everything that’s touted about the new web, web 2.0, real-time web, whatever you like to call it. While they have “an introductory video that can only be described as epic,” I think that LeapFish has a fundamental problem.

It’s not that it’s slow (it is, even when typing in the search box). The problem is that the term that comes to mind to describe it is not “search engine” but “distraction engine.” The front page is littered with News, Celebrity News, Mashable, Popular Videos, Facebook, Twitter, Weather, and Deal of the Day. Ultimately, LeapFish shows me a bunch of things I don’t care about, but will probably get distracted by anyway. I know where to find the things that I want, and at present I’m not interested in finding more things to do online just for the sake of doing things online.

The LeapFish video quotes Charles Darwin in observing that the organisms which survive are those that adapt fastest to change. I take a much more Boyd-like approach when it comes to people: he who makes the change survives. If businesses are trying to keep up, they’ve already lost. This is why no one has yet become a Google-killer: Google changes the game faster than others do; that’s how they stay on top. I remember watching Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail play catch-up with GMail’s storage and archiving capabilities. Google constantly innovates, changing the game, not playing catch-up. If LeapFish thinks it’s ahead of the curve because it adapts fast, it’s already lost to those who are creating the change it’s adapting to.

The Future of Google

For those of you who want to argue that Google is doing just fine (ahem), I refer you to some new articles on the subject. Google may not be in the trouble I originally blogged about, but this article generalizes the difficulties it faces in terms of past internet giants like AOL, and this article reiterates the Twitter Threat discussed in the first article. As I recall, somebody and somebody else have been writing Ubiquity scripts to let them search specific sites from any webpage. Dare I say it, but I think people are finding alternatives to searching with the Old Ways.

Tom’s remarks about One Login to Rule Them All, however, is still valid. I won’t take that away from him.