Search Innovation - 3 to Watch
Posted on Tue, Jul 19, 2011
It's time for our monthly installment of What to Watch in Search. While the number of new companies in the space seems to be fewer, search innovation is showing no signs of slowing down. Take a look at 3 developments in the search market that caught our eye:
DuckDuckGo: a new type of search engine, DuckDuckGo differentiates itself from Google and Bing by delivering "unfiltered" or "unpersonalized" results. What does that mean? Each DuckDuckGo search looks for the term you have entered with no real context or preconceived notions about you as the searcher. In contrast, Google and Bing create a profile of the searcher based on past searches and behavioral patterns. The company offers an interesting, and somewhat mortifying demonstration of how this might play out - it makes you realize how invasive some of the "personalization" technologies can be.
Google Product Search: The product formerly known as Froogle has been the recipient of much attention at Google these days. They've recently adding local availability information and discovery tools, and now they're turning their attention to the merchants to ensure the more user-friendly data feeds. To ensure the best search and product comparison experience, Google Product Search feeds will now include availability information, images, size and color selections for all products. Further, they've put a line in the sand that on September 22, 2011, merchants who are non-compliant with delivering the updated feeds will have actions taken against them. All of this in the name of best servicing the customer.
SearchTeam.com from Zakta: The press release calls it a real-time collaborative search and curation engine, I think it looks like social search - ultimately, both are probably accurate! Users create their own SearchSpace and can invite others to search with them; all of those results are curated in real-time and saved for future use, sharing or editing. Social elements help further inform the data, allowing users to comment, share impressions, chat and attach relevant uploaded documents. To me, it makes immediate sense for those team projects you did in college or when a management team is investigating a new market direction, but the company's uses range from coordinating group vacations and events, to building out the competitive landscape for a new product launch.
It's amazing that after this many years, innovators continue to come up with new and practical ways to improve search. If you're interested in seeing some of the other innovators we've covered, click
here.