January 25, 2006

The Future Term For "Search" =

"Found" = A paraphrased version of the point I was trying to make in my second to last post.

While we will undoubtedly be typing text into things for quite some time to come, the difference between 'today' and 'tomorrow' is the fact that at the moment we still have to go looking for the things we are desirous to locate. Of course blogs/data feeds have definitely started pushing the momentum in the right direction. And there are several tools out there now that bring contextual content to our doorstep without even 'asking' and instead implying through the blog posts and/or emails we write, the web sites and blogs we visit, etc... In fact, Google has been slowly developing a *MONSTER* of a contextual content delivery mechanism for quite some time.

With that said, Yahoo has been focused around contextual content delivery since day one. In fact, whats interesting about all of this is the we are slowly but surely watching the Yahoo-style of 'search':

* go to Yahoo.com and click around till we find what we want -- or the 'browsing the aisles' type of search. Of course the ability to actually type in a search phrase exists, but their core focus has always been directory-based, or better said, click-to-find.

and the Google-style of search

* Type in what your looking for and get the results delivered to your browser window. Google of course has been pushing things towards more of a Yahoo-style with their various "Portal" projects, but type-to-find has always been their bread and butter.

begin to merge together taking on both a push and pull type look-and-feel. (Maybe the LLUP project makes a bit more sense now?)

Whats even more interesting is that behind the scenes both Microsoft via various contextual search agent projects and Novell via the Beagle project -- which was actually started first, outside of Novell by Nat Friedman and Edd Dumbill via the Dashboard project -- have been working on these same types of systems. [NOTE: See this post from over a year ago for more detail.]

So in reality its not just Google and Yahoo! but Microsoft AND (of all companies! ;) Novell who all have a chance of taking a fairly large slice of the "Future Found Pie."

Hmmmm... ;)