not letting up

Today's issue of The Cud features a state of the internet special edition, including a look at the search wars by yours truly.

Google isn't letting up with a number of new additions to the Google Suite. Google Co-op is a merge of a wiki and web directory as search filtering. It'll certainly be useful in the most popular categories, but won't help improve searching for anything else. It may not even take off - depending on whether the end result ends up aiding or frustrating end users. It'll take manpower on the part of google to keep the results relevant and up to date. The other newborn isn't that new, but rather an old dog with increasingly new tricks. The lastest version of Google Desktop is packed full of add-on gadgets, with the promise of more to come. Both addititions call upon the human resource all internet users are, these two looking to mine the talents of the best and brightest to hone their talents.

(update: Google Talk is moving into a mobile phone near you)

And all this deep searching prompted a small memory for me. It was in the back of a dark studio, I'd been put in front of a computer screen for no particular reason. And there it was, all white space with a little logo in the middle with some strange word I'd never heard of. It was my first Google, and I was in love. Not becuase the search was any better (how does one tell anyway), but because of it's simplicity. Back then, on dial up, the incumbents Excite and Altavista were jam packed with all sorts of bells and whistles. Too many words on the screen that I didn't care about. Too much to load from the other side of the world. Excite still does it. I just wanted search, and nothing else. Google gave that to me, and I've stuck with it.

Let's hope it stays the same.