People don’t want search engines…

Does anyone remember “portals”? Back in the day, Yahoo, Lycos and Excite represented the primary destination for most consumers on the web. Then came Google. I think we’re poised to see the same happen again. Search engines, for all their importance today, face their greatest threat from social networks. Consumers have never cared who has the best algorithm. They don’t want to sift through multiple results simply to get the desired answer. They just want the answer. Put more succinctly, consumers don’t watch search engines; consumers want find engines.

So why social netowrks? John Battelle noted some time back, he pays more attention to what his contacts recommend than what he finds for himself. Seth provides a complementary point of view, and I think he’s right. Business depends – in part, at least – on how well you connect users with one another and permit them the tools to answer questions for the rest. Consider that MySpace and Yahoo account for over half of all impressions and Yahoo increasingly depends on social tools as part of its value proposition. If you think of the web as a network of nodes, consumers and businesses often want the quickest path to the node containing its required information. Google does the best job today of pointing folks there. Don’t expect that to remain the same. An infinite number of monkeys may prove more useful at producing great works.

PC World thinks Apple may have introduced Safari for Windows to generate search revenues. I’m not sure that makes total sense, but, clearly, it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. For many companies, search represents a significant source of traffic and, by extension, revenues. While conducting ethnographic research for a project, I was amazed by the number of consumers who went to Google or Yahoo and typed my company’s domain into the search box instead of the browser address bar. For many individuals, search is the web. But this model is changing. Given the recent backlash, and the growing ability of social networks to point folks in the right direction, Google may need to watch its back

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