Welcome to the Astoria Rich Media WebLog

Labor Day is “celebrated mainly as a day of rest,” according to Wikipedia. Unless you spend Labor Day – or any day – searching the Internet via Google or Yahoo! or another traditional search engine. Then, irrelevant information overload turns Labor Day into a day of labor spent slogging through extraneous results looking for an appropriate answer.

Unfortunately, every day is a day of labor for millions of people conducting Internet searches. Each person is really only looking for one result, but that doesn't seem to enter into the equation. This is a very engineering-centric view of an end-user’s need for information.  “We know you're only looking for one answer, but you know what?  We have technology to deliver 50 million answers, so here they are.  And by the way, we delivered the additional 49,999,999 answers in less than half a second. Cool, huh?”

The problem I’ve always had with Google is that it provides tremendous depth, no breadth, and very siloed information. I can get millions of text returns, or I can get millions of image returns, or I can get millions of query returns for video. And don’t forget all the advertising I also receive as part of my “experience.”

What I don't seem to get is the answer to my question. What I would really like is an accurate answer delivered in multiple media types. Don't assume I like getting information in text format.  Frankly, most people are visually oriented, and as I've said before, a picture is worth a thousand words. In my case – and I’d bet most people’s case – combining both images and text that answer the same question would be the most efficient information delivery experience.

As it stands now, the vast range of search returns forces me into browse mode, which is fine if I have the time to cruise around the web. But I don’t. Like most people, I’m in a hurry. Browsing millions of returns just slows me down.

So what’s going to help me cut down my Internet search work load and celebrate Labor Day as Wikipedia intended? Search alternatives that are taking a stab at more integrated (or clustered) search returns. One is a company called Grokker, which was spun out of a company I worked for several years ago. They offer a very cool mapping interface, and a very nice clustering of information that pulls out relationships that are often not obvious. Another interesting site I just came across is Tafiti, which has a beta version of a Silverlight-based rich media search tool, which tried to combine books, news, RSS feeds, and images – but no video – into a single user experience.

Let me point out I am not criticizing Google. Any company that can go from zero to a zillion dollars in revenue almost instantly (in relative terms, of course) has obviously done something right. But there is always something new and interesting lurking around the next corner. Rich media and clustered search are the next corners. How will Google and the established search engines respond? Anything can happen. Remember, not that long ago, Google was a tiny shop, and Alta Vista (remember them?) was the king of the hill.