Search is broken. You may not feel the same way, but it is. And it might require a new web standard to emerge in order for it to truly be fixed.
Now with Google at over $600 a share and 91% of us using search engines (and largely satisfied with them) it's easy to believe that search is anything but broken. However, the problem is that the entire search paradigm was built during the Web 1.0 era when generally all we cared about searching was the content that other people created. That's not true anymore.
Today all of us are generating a torrent of content across lots of different sites - sometimes hundreds of them. This includes everything from financial transactions your bank site is logging to email that sits in your Gmail or Hotmail account to content you're posting on Facebook and, increasingly, documents you're creating using rich internet applications like Google Docs. In addition, lots of data comes back at you too - replies, account alerts, pokes, etc. There's currently no way to easily search it all.
Right now when you want to find bits that you generated you have to think first about where it lives and then go to that site and search for it. Here are some of the search boxes that I utilize on a daily basis. You may recognize them too.
Now, I don't know about you but I don't want to think about where my information lives or use 100 different search boxes. That's the beauty of Google. You go to a single box you enter what you want and instantaneously you find it. You don't have to think about what site it's on. Google knows so you don't have to. We need a secure, opt-in web version of Google Desktop that can find all the bits we generate online, even if they are behind walls.
At a minimum, the portals will evolve so that you can not only easily search the web, but all of the stuff you generate on their properties via one box. You should be able to go to Google.com and search Gmail, GCal, GDocs, GReader and Jaiku. Right now you can't - easily.
However, with a little bit of collaboration, the opportunity is much bigger. It would be great to see a secure XML standard emerge for data sharing. This way, if I enter a search in AOL.com and I let it access my Gmail account, it will pull up my messages in the search perhaps in a special tab. This is a topic I am hoping some of the speakers will address at next week's Search Marketing Expo, which I plan to attend.
I will let the technologists figure the details out. What I do know is that people don't want to think about where their data is. In my case, I have upped my Gmail storage to 30 gigs because I use it as a private intranet (I have written about this extensively). I constantly email stuff into it - e.g. web pages, personal docs, etc. - to basically create the one box interface I am looking for. Others do the same or use Greasemonkey to fuse sites together. But that's not what normal people want.
So search is broken. If we leave it to Google they will fix it - but only within Google's land. How about Yahoo or Microsoft? Same. They can only search their own servers. It would be great to see everyone work together to make everything an individual wants to find searchable from one place.
