This piece was written by guest author Charles Knight, the editor of AltSearchEngines. It is the third guest installment in the Rising Star Dream Team Future of Search series.

Collaborate or Perish

My wife and I were walking down the hallway of the local hospital the other day, and the in-house newsletter was displayed in a box attached to the wall. The box was notched so that the headline could be seen as people passed by. This day, the headline consisted of only three words, so they were especially large. It read, “Collaborate or Perish.” I never did read the article, but I did take a copy of the newsletter home, cut out the headline, and placed it on my keyboard, where it sits right now. “Collaborate or Perish,” it reminds me, every time that I sit down to work. It sits on my keyboard because I think it answers Kaila’s question; “What is the Future of Search?

I haven’t read any of the other “Dream Team” essays (because they are not available), but I imagine that they cover well trends in Search such as Verticals, Personalization, Semantic Search, Natural Language Processing, etc. I may be wrong. Regardless, if they do, it would establish, in my mind, that view of the future which takes existing trends and mentally extrapolates them a few years into the future. Then you just describe what you “see.”

Extending today’s trends makes perfect sense; in fact, it makes the most sense. After all, if there is a trend towards “green” fuel alternatives (to combat the trend of global warming), then isn’t it incumbent upon the futurists to tell us that in 2010 we’ll all be driving cars that run on Ethanol? This can be called the majority view, i.e. common sense. Whatever is happening now will likely continue. To argue against it, against trends that are here, now, puts a tremendous burden of proof on the naysayer.

One such minority view is called “Science Fiction.” I could claim, as Sci-Fi movies do, that in 2010 we will have solved all of today’s linguistic hurdles. That you will be able to talk to your computer as easily as you talk to a friend; how could you disagree? Maybe there will be a scientific breakthrough, and maybe there won’t. Maybe Semantic Search will succeed, and maybe it won’t. Sci-Fi just presumes that there will be a breakthrough. I don’t mean to imply that this approach is always wrong. For my money, Jeff Han’s multi-touch invention (Microsoft’s Surface) is the fulfillment of the Sci-Fi movie Minority Report.

I also haven’t read the “other” Dream Team’s articles, those written by Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask executives (I imagine that they won’t read this one either). I don’t attend those conferences either. No excuses, but I am just not wired to listen to major search engines talk about the future of major search engines. As I have said repeatedly, it just reminds me too much of the Big 3 U.S. automakers smoking fat cigars, only to go bankrupt for not imagining that they could ever have—wait for it—competition. Yahoo!, MSN and Ask have already, in the year 2007, shown us that they cannot compete with Google. Even if all three of them merged into one I doubt that they could do it. They are second tier search engines, and they always will be.

So, Kaila, my prediction for Search in the year 2010 is not a prediction at all, it is a possibility.

This probably won’t surprise anybody, but the Future of Search rests with the 100 or so best Alternative search engines.

Visit my blog (”Visit my blog, please!?) and you can scroll to your heart’s content until you are convinced that they already have all of the innovation that they need to go after the Big G. But, and this should be the “but” heard ’round the blogosphere, they have been, they are, and they will be just so many gnats on an elephant’s back as long as they remain separate.

What would worry you most: 100 little BBs, 10 bullets, or one cannonball coming at you? Which would you prefer on your arm, the soft rays of the beach sun, or the same rays focused to a super-hot point with a magnifing glass? (There’s that new UI again!) How about a drag race between a Corvette and thirty 10-hp mopeds, or one 300-hp Camaro? There is strength in numbers, but not when they are individually wrapped. Collaborate or Perish. If the Alts don’t begin their collaboration now, the Google cycle will just continue unchecked.

[The Google cycle:

1. Look at the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines.
2. Imitate their approach, hire their talent, or just buy some of them outright.
3. Replace the now-missing Alts with lesser quality ones.
4. Repeat steps 1-3.]

Collaborate or Perish. The Future of Search in the Year 2010 cannot be known, because that decision has yet to be made.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 8:05 pm and is filed under Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.