Month: August 2008

My last post, Is Google Good Enough?, challenged would-be Google killers to identify and address clear consumer needs for which Google isn’t good enough as a solution. I like helping my readers, so here are some ideas.

• Shopping. Google Product Search (fka Froogle) is not one of Google’s crown jewels. At best, it works well when you know the exact name of the product you are looking for. But it pales in contrast to any modern ecommerce site, such as Amazon or Home Depot. What makes a shopping site successful? Put simply, it helps users find what they want, even when they didn’t know exactly what they wanted when they started.
• Finding a job. Google has not thrown its hat into the ring of job search, and even the page they offer for finding jobs at Google could use some improvement. The two biggest job sites, Monster and Careerbuilder, succeed in terms of the number of jobs posted, but aren’t exactly optimized for user experience. Dice does better, but only for technology jobs. Interestingly, the best job finding site may be LinkedIn–not because of their search implementation (which is adequate but not innovative), but because of their success in getting millions of professionals to provide high-quality data.
• Finding employees. Again, LinkedIn has probably come closest to providing a good employee finding site. The large job sites (all of which I’ve used at some point) not only fail to support exploratory search, but also suffer from a skew towards ineligible candidates and a nuisance of recruiters posing as job seekers. Here again, Google has not tried to compete.
• Planning a trip. Sure, you can use Expedia, Travelocity, or Kayak to find a flight, hotel, and car rental. But there’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to planning a trip, whether for business or pleasure. The existing tools do a poor job of putting together a coordinated itinerary (e.g., meals, activities), and also don’t integrate with relevant information sources, such as local directories and reviews. This is another area where Google has not tried to play.

Note two general themes here. The first is thinking beyond the mechanics of search and focusing on the ability to meet user needs at the task level. The second is the need for exploratory search. These only scratch the surface of opportunities in consumer-facing “search” applications. The opportunities within the enterprise are even greater, but I’ll save that for my next post.

As Chief Scientist of Endeca, I spend a lot of my time explaining to people why they should not be satisfied with an information seeking interface that only offers them keyword search as an input mechanism and a ranked list of results as output. I tell them about query clarification dialogs, faceted navigation, and set analysis. More broadly, I evangelize exploratory search and human computer information retrieval as critical to addressing the inherent weakness of conventional ranked retrieval. If you haven’t heard me expound on the subject, feel free to check out this slide show on Is Search Broken?.

But today I wanted to put my ideology aside and ask the the simple question: Is Google good enough? Here is a good faith attempt to make the case for the status quo. I’ll focus on web search, since, as I’ve discussed before on this blog, enterprise search is different.

1) Google does well enough on result quality, enough of the time.

While Google doesn’t publish statistics about user satisfaction, it’s commonplace that Google usually succeeds in returning results that users find relevant. Granted, so do all of the major search engines: you can compare Google and Yahoo graphically at this site. But the question is not whether other search engines are also good enough–or even whether they are better. The point is that Google is good enough.

2) Google doesn’t support exploratory search. But it often leads you to a tool that does.

The classic instance of this synergy is when Google leads you to a Wikipedia entry. For example, I look up Daniel Kahneman on Google. The top results is his Wikipedia entry. From there, I can traverse links to learn about his research areas, his colleagues, etc.

3) Google is a benign monopoly that mitigates choice overload.

Many people, myself includes, have concerns about Google’s increasing role in mediating our access to information. But it’s hard to ignore the upside of a single portal that gives you access to everything in one place: web pages, blogs, maps, email, etc, And it’s all “free”–at least in so far as ad-supported services can be said to be free.

In summary, Google sets the bar pretty high. There are places where Google performs poorly (e.g., shopping) or doesn’t even try to compete (e.g., travel). But when I see the series of companies lining up to challenge Google, I have to wonder how many of them have identified and addressed clear consumer needs for which Google isn’t good enough as a solution. Given Google’s near-monopoly in web search, parity or even incremental advantage isn’t enough.