March 23, 2005
The Battle for Your Attention
The latest battleground for the search engines is definitely being waged right on your computer. They're all trying to gain and/or hold their market share by using software applications such as Toolbars that integrate into your browser. And they're all moving into an area that is generically known as Desktop search.
Does it make sense for them to approach it this way? Yes, for several reasons.
Is it necessarily the best thing for user? I'm not so sure.
The various toolbars being offered by the search engines (Google's, Yahoo's and MSN's) have been around a little while now. Interestingly, there are a lot of other types of toolbars out there too. Adobe has partnered with Yahoo! to offer a toolbar version, Alexa has had one forever (though last time I looked at it theirs was still loaded with Spyware) and even places as diverse as Netcraft, which does server/host ranking, The Yellow Pages and All Headline News offer a browser toolbar.
Toolbars certainly make sense for the search engines, and in fact many other industries. It not only helps them retain their users and create customer loyalty --being as easy to use as they are-- but they can also provide the engines with some very valuable feedback as they move closer and closer to the Personalization of Search.
Much the same will probably hold true when Desktop Search --with which you'll be able to search both the Web and documents aleady on your computer-- begins to make its foray into the public consciousness. IMHO browser toolbars will always be easier to use than desktop search though. Maybe I'm strange in that belief, but I always seem to have anywhere between 10 and 40 windows open, which are of course covering my desktop. It would be more of a hassle to get back to my desktop than it would be to simply type in a URL address.
Anyway, I started going off on a tangent there. What it all boils down to is that I'm far from convinced that the producers of the current crop of toolbar creators are doing a good job at all for their users. Mainly because their software cannot be tailored with plugins for each individual's needs. You're basically locked into whatever the search engine wants you to see and do.
Which I guess is the point to the engines putting out their toolbars in the first place. They want to lock you into using their search and their portals. I get the sense that they're really not building them for user benefit so much as they are building them for their own benefit.
What would I like to see?
An open source toolbar development, where you get the base toolbar and can then add on the plugins you want. Don't get me wrong, there are some toolbars out there which don't lock you into using this or that search engine to find stuff on the web. But they're still lacking because there's no chance for plugin creation.
In other words, they may be free, but they're not as good as they could be yet. Open source would be the best model, but even that is not a necessity. A development community that is truly listening to users and implementing what they need via plugins is.
Heck, I wouldn't even mind someone, or several someone's most likely, developing a toolbar that was monetized! Meaning, the developers cut a deal with some of the resources they send people to so that they get paid a penny or whatever for every user who ends up going to that site via their toolbar. That would be fair I think. As long as they don't automatically ixnay adding a resource simply because they choose not to pay for traffic.
In other words, listen to the users and do what's right by them. Monetize what you can, but don't let that be the governing factor as to whether a plugin is made available or not.
I can even see a co-branding opportunity with normal site owners. The idea being that the web site owners could install a little cgi or php spider on their site to index all of their pages, then the toolbar could connect with that for a new type of Site Search. Offer that as a free option to both Webmasters and their users so that people would start installing the toolbar. Because you know that eventually people will want the application to do more.
Are there any developers out there who want to take on such a project? I would certainly be interested in being involved in the marketing if someone has the skill, know-how, time and drive to create the back end.