One particularly nice part of this model is that it generates low-cost capital. Since most users never get anywhere near the $100 minimum AdSense payout, Google gets to sit on the cash, which by my reading of their most recent report is about $307 million and growing at around $12 million per month. Small change for a company with quarterly profits above $700 million, but a nice little no-interest credit line nonetheless.
But I digress.
The fundamental problem with search is that users expect an oracle. Unfortunately, search engines are deterministic machines, and their input is insufficient to allow them to see inside the minds of their users. Some attempts at personalization have been made, but even the same person will expect different results at different times. So when I search for “java”, even though I’m more likely to be looking for information on programming, sometimes I might really be interested in coffee.
One solution is to move the search from a monolithic experience onto multiple targeted engines, and to make the user select the one most likely to have the desired results. To some extent, Google and other engines have done this; readers will be familiar with separate tabs for image search or news search. The key here, to paraphrase the Delphic Oracle, is: “Searcher, know thyself!”
What this new product does is allow experts in every niche to create focused catalogs designed to return optimal results in those niches. As an example, I created a quick and dirty catalog to search for stock information that can be accessed through the search box on my blog or at www.stockaroo.com. While by no means comprehensive, even with a number of refinements, I find it already gives me a reasonable response to my queries. Please provide feedback on queries that return bad results or sites that ought to be added by emailing me at investor@inelegantinvestor.com.
While Google has made it quite simple to set up Custom Search Engines, one thing that could be improved is the collaboration feature. Though there is the ability to allow others to help customize your engine, the interface allows no way to see what changes they’ve made and modify them. So you’d better entirely trust your collaborators, because they have the power to completely subvert your results. Of course, you can remove them and all their modifications, but without being able to see what they’ve done, that’s a rather blunt management tool.
