I’m thinking about dropping Google from my workflow on the internet. They already have years of search history on me, along with correlation of that data (or significant portions of it anyway) through several email addresses, websites and financial bits and pieces. Maybe it’s time for me to stop just handing all that data over to them. I was actually thinking about enabling my web history with them: I figured, hell, if they have that data, then why can’t I benefit from it too? Then, I began reading the TOS for that thing and it just didn’t feel right, especially with them trying to install some toolbar shit.
So I’m gonna give it a test run of leaning on Yahoo for what little regular searches I do any more. Maybe try it for the next week or so and see how things go. Would be even cooler to use another search engine altogether, but I’m really only doing it to be difficult. If anyone knows how to make my experiment more fruitful by recommending a better search engine, I’m all ears.
At this point though, I’m all but certain that search is a dead metaphor. Search engines are going to be replaced by “have engines” and eventually “volition engines” with intelligent agency, streams, immersion and push-pull datawakes. And if you need me to throw a bunch more jargon at you, you just let me know, ‘kay?
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13 Comments
Can anyone else view this?
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=aPjehNxs3BG8eoWCODY80A
Playing around with Yahoo Pipes… it’s a combined feed for my main site and my research feed on Tumblr. Nothing incredibly sophisticated nor do I so far see how something like this adds a lot of value to the typical user experience. But maybe I’m thinking too small!
Well - it works for me but it doesn’t appear any more useful than have your blog and tumblr feeds put into an RSS reader.
That said I haven’t looked into Pipes properly so maybe there is more to it than you have explored so far…
Oh - and what the hell is a push-pull datawake ?
I thought I knew tech jargon as well as anyone but I’m obviously turning into an old fogey.
I just had a discussion with my dad the other day trying to explain what a search engine was compared to a directory search. I was trying to use Google as an example of “something indexing the whole web” but halfway through I realized I was making stuff up and I had to admit I didn’t know anything about the difference between searches anymore beyond mandatory submission in some, and spidering in others. “Spidering” always reminds me of those creepy security robots in Minority Report that forcefully scan peoples eyes.
Short and sweet, I’m starting to really love Ask.com. It could be its recent prominent marketing, but just search any word (or question) and notice the different category widgets you get in the results. Automatically: Narrow by Search, Expand Your Search, Related Names, Main Results, Images, Encyclopedia, News, & Video. Those first three are becoming my new best friends in terms of productivity and inspiration.
Hi Tim,
Thanks for your excellent blog, I find it quite stimulating. You should check out scroogle.org. I think that you will like their philosophy.
This makes me sad about google, with the whole spying thging.
Because I love google! It helps me make connections between weird seemingly unrelated topics. Its an ENTP thing! Lateral thinking.
Yahoo sucks for that. It doesn’t bring up things that connect two key words in the same way.
I am noty as on top of this as you as far as how the algorithms work and everything, but google is really good for connecting keywords and having the keywords come up in the results.
If I learn a new word I google it. People, everything. Probably yahoo could do that, but what if I want to find the connection or interrelationship between freemasonry and calvinism, you know some convoluted thing?
Yahoo won’t bring up as good of stuff.
I have no problem against advertisements and my beef is only partly with the tracking. I’m getting bored with the Google algorithm itself.
I love reading your tags in my RSS Feed. Do they show up in your main page anywhere?
I particularly love the one on this post: ” Tim Boucher Radar Blips my plan is to keep making up words until somebody gives me a bunch of money for it!”
Yeah they show up in the sidebar. I’m glad someone else thinks they are funny!
I think the whole search engine paradigm is dangerous, the whole internet should not depend on a few sites sites to find things. The future is a more distributed peer to peer structure, with browsers themselves (or local proxies) doing the indexing and sharing in a completely anonymous way, gathering info as the individual surfs. The indexing is easy, the network structures which lead to anonymity I can envision, but not down to the nuts and bolts.
(Of course this wouldn’t make the Internet any more anonymous than it already is(n’t), but it would make search history anonymous to peers, unlike the original Gnutella network)
Let’s build it then! If we can each envision parts of it and be clear in our expressions and work together, then there’s no reason it needs to stay the way it is.
I think that’s a good idea, and it should be done. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now software wise, but luckily I think a lot of things (including that) actually utilize the same set of core technologies so if I play my cards right I will be able to kill a few birds with one stone - certainly you’ll be the first to know if I get any good work done on that…
Excellent: the sixth stratagem, optimize. Solve two problems at once.
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[...] One week ago, I began an experiment of cutting the Google search engine out of my online workflow. As a “power” internet user, and online researcher, writer and new media dabbler, I like to think that the trends and patterns I see in my own internet usage probably apply to many other people. I switched from Google searches because I am growing increasingly wary of having one corporation have complete ownership of patterns derived off my data usage. I am, of course, still extremely wary about that. But my experiment in searching yielded interesting “results”. [...]