There were rumors that Paul McCartney was playing in NYC… Well he actually did play in NYC and I was really curious where he played so I hit the search engines and realized that the essence of the Google and Twitter brands have taken shape.
By default I hit Google search only to find out that the first hits did not tell me where the gig took place. Sure, I could have looked a little further but it’s clear that mixing ‘what is happening now’ with traditional search indexes is not straightforward from a user experience perspective. So, I went over to Twitter and of course found out immediately where Paul McCartney was playing.
So, two brands and products with a different purpose: Twitter lives up to its promise “See what is happening, right now” and found a differentiating promise in the search engine space.
Google is the search engine for everything but “now”. Even when Google indexes everything real time it will need to do some serious user experience design to stay on top of being the search engine of everything: mixing the moment of now with the past and future in one elegant interface.
What is your bet: divergence or convergence in the search engine space?
Search will change significantly in the next 12 month. As the value of information becomes shorter (life-cycle) and more traffic gets transferred from social networks (referrals) the value of google will go down. Their is just nothing social in finding a fact on google.
My bet is that Bing will go head on with google in the traditionally strong search verticals like shopping, travel, etc – FB & Twitter will take the Now space and Google will be back to comparison with Wolfram Alpha where facts to questions are the driving motivation.
At the end folks dont have a search problem, but a discovery problem – and that will be increasingly shaped by a social experience that delivers results worth talking about.
Spot on Udo!