[Lilug] The Elephant in the Room: Google Monoculture

[Peter Capazzi]

IMHO - Google is the best one-stop shop for just about everything. Page
searches is one thing... I like to do price comparisons with Google
Shopping... Maps is great and I get a kick out of using the API. I used
to be big fan of searching newsgroups through them, but I think web
pages now turn up more relevant information. 
 
However, if I come across one site that beats one of the facets of
Google I'd probably use it primarily. Like if I'm aware of a site that I
can do comparison shopping with that is simpler or farther reaching than
Google Shopping I'd use it exclusively. 

I don't see how... but if some site did web page searches better than
Google I would use both until I was sure I was getting better results. I
would sacrifice some ease of use... but not much. 
 
I thought there was a woman out there (ex-Google employee?) that was
going to start her own search engine. Funny that if you put in Search
Engine as a search term the first entry from Google is Dogpile Web
Search.

		I personally wonder who will be the first to volunteer
to stop using Google.  In my experience, it's the only search engine
that finds exactly what I'm looking for almost every time. 

	Its not about volunteering to stop using google, at least not in
the way you seem to be thinking. I'm not suggesting taking the GNU
approach of we will rewrite a perfectly good system so we can control
it. Something will come along that is better than google, and it
probably won't be a search engine like we think of them today. People
will "volunteer" to stop using google the way they "volunteer" to use
google today. Not as some sort of sacrifice, but because its in their
best immediate interest.

	We already have plenty of websites that copy wikipedia (where
google often takes you) verbatim. and plenty of websites like
answers.com and stackoverflow that use crowdsourcing in different ways.
No one seems to have the magic formula yet, but it will happen.
Somewhere between google and Stephen Baxter's scenario, will be a search
engine thats different from google and somehow better.

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