Digging Deeper
Searching the Web some five years ago for a nearby store that carried running shoes in his hometown of Guelph, Ontario, Tim Nye instead found a student's posting about a party she'd attended there. "She'd had too much to drink and threw up on her running shoes," Nye says. Search engines often don't give you the information you want. Nye saw an opportunity; recently he launched a search site that lets users find information on shops and businesses near particular locations.
Over the past decade, search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo! have become the backbone of the Web. And it's no longer enough for them just to find a Web page: They're also tracking down videos, bargains, and job listings. "The big search engines are constantly adding new features," says Chris Sherman of searchenginewatch.com. In about a year, Yahoo! alone launched services that hunt for videos, pictures, travel deals, local information, and even files buried in your desktop hard drive.
But the future could be specialized sites, many of which are adding their own tricks to finding information on the Web. Nye's site, www.truelocal.com, starts by scouring databases of local storefronts and then scans the Internet for more details.
While TrueLocal starts with place, another recent option starts with time. Technorati ( www.technorati.com ) searches Web logs--blogs--where it's crucial to find new postings quickly. So Technorati's founder, Dave Sifry, helped persuade the blogging community to include "pings" that signal when a new posting goes up. Technorati gets an automatic notification, and, in turn, the blogger gets heard around the world. "We look at the Web as a stream of events, where time is critical," Sifry says.
Sites like http://del.icio.us and www.flickr.com, meanwhile, depend less on search and more on "found." Though they're still mainly for techies, they could supplant some of what search engines do for us. At del.icio.us, Web surfers "tag" their favorite sites, articles, music, or whatever else they've found on the Web. It's like saving a bookmark on a website rather than your PC. Users then publicly share their tags so others can benefit from what they've discovered. As common tags accumulate, say "photography," users can sort sites according to shared interests. At Flickr, a photo-sharing site, users are doing the same thing with pictures, creating clusters of images with common subjects or themes.
Other new search sites are updating an old concept--metasearch, or combing results from a number of search engines. To make it easier to understand results, www.clusty.com adds a panel to the left of the results that organizes them into categories. "It helps you . . . put things into some context," says Sherman. And some engines aim to prosper by simply specializing. Job postings from sites like monster.com and craigslist.org are brought together at www.indeed.com. And www.become.com combines pricing guides with articles and other shopping resources. The trend toward combination seems so strong that the question arises: Do we need a search engine for search engines?
This story appears in the December 5, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.