Our browsers are dumb, and encourage 'search'. Google's made inroads by making a faster browser that makes it easier to 'search' (through them, of course), but keeping track of that information in the browser sucks. Browser bookmark tools are a joke, and web-based ones, while better, generally aren't much better.

I envision a 'browser' that can track my behaviour, watch what I do, show me more detailed history info, make 'history' part of my 'search' results, adapt my search to my behaviour and more. Perhaps Google will be the ones to do this, but they'll only do it if they can show us more ads (or "more relevant" ads).

Ideas: "history" on chrome, for example, shows me a little information on pages in my history, but not too much. Did I copy/paste information from that page? How long was I on it? Show me thumbnails from that page. Show me other meta data from that page (author, friends that shared it on facebook/g+, etc). Information on what I did with info on that page is often what I'm looking for, not just every page in my history with a particular word on it. Screenshots would help jog my memory, but so would something that said "you copied 'foobarbaz' from this page and emailed it to sam" next to a history result.

Merging in local bookmarked and historical pages in with regular search results. Or, more to the point, merging in external search engine results when I'm searching through browser history. Have an option to make searching my local history the default, with extras merged in from google/bing/yahoo/etc.

None of this will happen overnight, but... there's a huge amount of metadata associated with the activity with page data that isn't being used, because having us go to a browser bar and search (again!) for the same data we found 2 hours ago is more profitable. Our browsers are dumb right now, and there's quite a lot more that could be being done to take advantage of the local intelligence that lives on our desktops or in our devices.

In general, if you've visited a site once, it's way easier to find it back with Firefox, and it doesn't require a Google search.

If you think about it, it is very logical that Google doesn't want to move into this direction.

In Chrome these two aspects (history and Google search) are blurred, but it's not better for it. I'd say it is a good example of 2 half-assed features not making up for 1 good one.

Completions are based on history and bookmarks and includes not just URLs but page titles, bookmark text, and tags, possibly more (I'm still figuring this out).

Plus you lose all the menubars and crap that steal vertical real estate.

vimperator + tree style tab + ghostery + noscript + adblock plus + all-in-one sidebar + autopager + remove it permanently makes for a pretty slick browsing experience.

Chrome is better IMO as an applications interface. Especially, of course, Google's apps: gmail, maps, G+.

I'm leaning strongly toward a bifurcation of browsers. One mode is information aquisition / research, the other is as an AJAX web-app engine. The two needs differ, and my extensively tweeked Firefox config doesn't play particularly well with applications (GMail's keyboard shortcuts, f'rex). But it makes actually, you know, surfing the web, much better.

Doesn't google do this "in the cloud" (ugh) already?

They use your past history to tailor results to you (as DuckDuckGo calls it, "in your bubble"). It's done on their servers because they want the information, and quite frankly, have better resources to compute it on (not to mention they benefit from comparing you to others like you and so on and so forth).

I don't want to spill the beans though, so if you want to know more (or help me test/build it) please email me.

Yes, search is basically a grab bag, and browser history is decent but get's convoluted the more you use it. There are ways to make this easier, but why reinvent the wheel when you already own the wheel, right? Changing search will change major search engines business model, and share holders hate radical changes. Especially when you're raking in major dough.

Just thought I'd point out that Chrome supports different search engines and even politely asks you which one you'd like to use at first launch.

Edit: It used to be the case that if you bookmarked the result (and had your bookmarks synced with Google), it'd star the result as well. Seems this feature has gone, though.

If it's specifically previously answered queries you're interested in, maybe something like OneNote would be a better solution? Then you could search your notes and probably find the old answer with a lot less noise.

To me this makes his assertion,

> There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon.

fall a bit flat, since in the 90's and 00's, Google was exactly the counter-example to his proposal that there is no profit in enhancing the quality of search: Google was the company that proved that doing search well was exactly what people wanted and needed.

Now, if he was targeting Yahoo or another "search portal" that used to bombard users with ads, maybe he'd have a point. But Google? They're the ones that changed the playing field.

"Bell was visibly upset. The Stanford product was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, he explained, the users would leave the site instantly. Since his ad revenue came from people staying on the site—“stickiness” was the most desired metric in websites at the time—using BackRub’s technology would be counterproductive. “He told us he wanted Excite’s search engine to be 80 percent as good as the other search engines,” says Hassan. And we were like, “Wow, these guys don’t know what they’re talking about.” "

I hate to apply the fallacy of argument from authority here, but I wonder what OP's history with Google is? Not in the sense of, is he a good engineer...but whether he was with Google in its early, reportedly idealistic days? And if so, does his leaving Google indicates that those ideals are now gone? Or was he a relatively recent hire of Google before going to Microsoft? I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's not doing this just to boost up Microsoft's image.

--- And you don't even have to go back into Google's origin stories to see that they've consistently tried to minimize users' search durations: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/instant-about.html

He seems to have an axe to grind on Google, he seems to write negative stuff about them.

Google was giving better search results during their rise to prominence because PageRank wasn't as vulnerable to spamming. They also chose to make their adverts unobtrusive and very clearly distinguished from the search results.

The search syntax was also pretty advanced. You had parenthetical grouping, logical operators, and if I recall, the +/- include/exclude syntax originated with (or was at least used by) AV.

What AV wasn't was particularly relevant. You needed that advanced search syntax to be able to narrow down what you were looking for, and you still usually had to go through a few pages of results to find the right stuff.

When Google first hit public beta, it was immediately and compellingly superior to anyone else's search. I remember giving it a few tries, and switching within a matter of a week or so. It just gave me what I wanted.

It took a long time for anyone else to get off the "but we need to keep users on our pages for ad clicks" mindset, and by then it was too late.

Yahoo's directories were more profitable to it than search and thus search innovations were a threat to existing revenue. (See also: pg's Yahoo article about Yahoo's ad sales)

So innovation in search (and ads) came from outside Yahoo.

Similarly, any innovation that fundamentally threatens Google's ad revenue is unlikely to be pursued by Google itself. So there's no good reason to expect that sort of innovation to come from them.

Hence the example of Siri turning a spoken query into a vocalized answer (whenever it can), rather than a list of links with ads around them.

Though the author is off a bit when they imply there's no room for ads in the process. As most use of Siri still involves looking at the screen, on which it would be trivial to drop a narrow banner ad or promoted link.

> Serve up bad results and the user must search again and this doubles the number of sponsored links you get paid for.

Google gets paid when their search ads get clicked, not when they get displayed, so to maximize profit it is in their best interest to serve the absolute best results first.

In computer science, you don't (only) use search as an information retrieval mechanism. You use it primarily (whether that's Google, find <dir> | xargs egrep <pattern>, Microsoft/OS X help, etc.) as a mechanism to reduce entropy.

Information stored in files or on the internet is generally too vast to be easily absorbed by a brain that, marvellous as it is, has difficulties processing more than 7 +/- 2 symbols at a time [1]. We need a way to reduce the entropy and extract and filter information. And that's what search tools in computer science primarily tend to do (online or offline).

This is also why by default we use "and" to combine search terms and are generally more interested in narrowing search results rather than expanding them.

Some people admittedly also use search as a tool to look up information; I recall that there's some usability research where some people prefer using search, while others prefer a catalog scheme (such as bookmarks) and that forcing one type of person to use the opposite scheme reduces their productivity.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_...

Okay, but I'd love to know what the alternative is. I can't picture any more efficient method to organize the web, not that that means it isn't out there.

Search implies loss, as the author says. But it also implies that you can be anyone or anything and be found, in the vast swamp of the internet.

Edit: And he also implies that all searching is for things that we had in the first place. He completely forgets about searching for new information or things. Searching a library doesn't have to be unpleasant.

I guess there are people (sometimes me) who use google as their navigation bar, but in such a case they are not really using google as "search" anyway,

I don't see that search is broken at all. I think search is one tool in a great arsenal of other tools, like social media, blogs, sites like HN, that we have available for discovery of new content and new sites.

I guess that new and exciting product is posting negative blogs about a former employer. Step it up doc and contribute something meaningful.

Although, maybe if I quit Microsoft, and then joined Google, and then quit Google, and re-joined Microsoft I would. :)

Is it a job requirement for Microsoft that you have to write cheesy bash posts against Google?

So, what, Siri doesn't do search, even though you have to ask it to find stuff for you in Apple's commercials?

And somehow, by magically watching my search history, it will eliminate the need for me to search for a plumber?

And please, the idea that Google is trying to maximize the number of failed searches to display ads (no way, no how) or that Google is not researching ideas for guessing what you want before you search (something they've been saying for years in public about the ideal search engine) would be something Whittaker knows having worked at Google.

Did his boss at Google kick his cat or something?

Despite the tooltip for the magnifying glass on bing reading "Search"

These articles feel more like marketing pieces than actual thought-out articles. Other than the Google bashing, what was suggested for a solution?

I'm slightly incredulous when Microsoft calls out Google on search practices.. Weren't they caught copying Google's results last year..?

Even if it was - why would you join Microsoft?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when google started out, wasn't one of its core philosophies to reduce the number of times that users had to redo a search? And that they refused an offer from Excite because the Excite CEO complained that Google results were so good that users were NOT staying long enough to read the ads? Is the OP saying that this part of Google's history is a lie?

Let's say I'm in the mood for a donut, but I can't remember how late my favorite donut place is open (as if, but bear with me).

If I had a knowledgable human at my disposal, I could ask them "When does that donut place close?"

They might answer that "they're open for another hour."

There are two important differences between this and search:

First, my friend uses contextual data s/he knows about me to determine what specifically it is that I want to know, and takes my "query" in natural language. Services like Siri already go a long way toward making this a reality, and good natural language search queries have been quite usable for years now.

Second, the answer is a natural language representation of the information I was looking for, rather than a pointer to where I can find it. Wolfram Alpha does a pretty good job of this if your query is about math or science or some other type of data that can be relatively straightforwardly curated.

If I do the same with Google, I get a Yahoo Answers page asking why donut places close at noon. If I'm a bit more specific and ask "When does Rocket Donuts close?", the top result is, helpfully, their home page. I then click the result and look around the page for their hours, and finally find them at the bottom of the screen. Then I have to remember what day it is, what time it is, and subtract that from the appropriate number.

I also don't have much information about how current their information is, even though the web server helpfully responds that the page was last updated around noon on April 2nd.

One approach would be the so-called "Semantic Web", but I believe getting a majority of unsophisticated web publishers to reliably include semantic information is a fool's errand.

What's really missing is a way to index the web not by text, but by a machine's best guess at the interpretation of the of the text. Basically index a bunch of "facts" on the web, including who is claiming that they're true, and how long ago they made that claim. So the "key" would be something like "Rocket Donuts, Bellingham, WA, USA: Closing time on Thursday" and you would get a bunch of results, but you would sort by authority (something like PageRank) and recency (both descending). Hopefully the top value would be "5:00PM PDT".

Obviously one does not simply walk in and solve this kind of problem, but I believe whoever does would have a shot at replacing "search" as we know it.

I agree it feels dumb to surf the web they we do know. But this is a case of less is more. We can think of more complex solutions but those won't solve what our current solution solves for most of the people.

Surely there is a next big thing waiting to happen regarding content discovery, the last one I saw that attempts that is Prismatic, but there is a long road to even become a plausible alternative to what we do in our current search engines.

Well, I don't, but there's this company called Google that seems to.

Speaking broadly, "search" has been, as he points out, a major paradigm in human intellectual activity long before and far outside the web. Library card catalogs existed for searching. Door-to-door salesmen are effectively searching for customers. Inventories, indexes, tables-of-contents, filing systems, maps, and written records of many forms exist to facilitate searches or to distill the results of searches.

The word 'search' is a negative word. It fairly reeks of loss...

I think this opening statement embodies the mistake in his whole attitude very succinctly. A system for searching - particularly a nearly effortless and instantaneous one like Google offers - gives users the freedom to lose things, to forget things, secure in the knowledge that we'll be able to find them again when we decide we need them.

Your to-do list has 11 things on it; would you try to memorize it or would you write it down? Most people would rather write it down because it frees their minds to think about other things in the interim.

But of course, looking at the list is fundamentally a search.

Small example off the top of my head. The query is "Who uses LLVM?". 3rd result on Google is the "LLVM - Users" page that lists all the companies using it. Definitely the page that I need. This page is no where to be seen in the Bing first page results for the same query.

Saying that search is dead isn't right because for many queries, you need tons of results. Like someone mentioned here, if you're searching for a plumber, you want a selection. And implying that Google is broken isn't right when they do the best of both worlds: unobtrusive search with a ton of relevant results, and top 3 results that are about as good of a decision tool than what Bing currently has.

He claims we could do better, but how?

There have been a few ex-googlers who are upset about Google being an advertising company. Maybe they where sold into a dream that never materilised.

Lets say you own a company employing thousands and you discover the perfect way to improve your clients user experiance, the only problem is it disrupts the market so much your company is no longer profitable, so all your share holder and employees go without ? would you still do it?

Siri is a value add to a company that makes money out of its products. You have to own a 600$ piece of metal to have the privelege of using it.

And i much prefer googling - "Pet shop in dubai" for free. Weirdly - companies that do avertise have it much more together. If there paying for a dollar for my click, there definitly going to be open and have the products i want.

Sure money matters, and there is an "apparent" conflict. But in reality, the better the search results are, the more likely that users will use the search engine, which leads to more $$$. There is plenty of literature that demonstrates how serving poor search results will actually result in less ad revenue.

So James, being a former Googler, did you find that Google held back on search quality in favour of ad revenue?

http://robertelwell.info/blog/search-haters-gonna-hate/

SO without search you'd be relying on asking Hackernews/Twitter etc for every single enquiry you have...

Including the embarrassing ones...

However, the solution you propose would fail if similar precedents are to be considered. Users do not like manually curating lists (remember Facebook friend lists?). On a philosophical point, your solution requires that users know what they don't know: that is, they don't know that the "poker" question at a given time might be better answered by a site outside their circle. If users were encouraged to curate their own sources to limit the search for knowledge from, then that encourages the echo chamber phenomenon which ends up hurting the "open" web.

>Users do not like manually curating lists No one is forcing them, I'm not proposing this is the default behaviour, this would be a part of advanced search.

>your solution requires that users know what they don't know No, it enables users who do know something to leverage that knowledge (as the existing "site:" qualifier allows with a single site)

A very small number of google users even know about any kind of advanced functionality so there'd be no risk of an "echo chamber phenomenon".

If Microsoft wants to convince people they have better tools than Google, there's more classy and informative ways of going about it.

There are surely diminishing returns for doing increasingly sophisticated things with the contents of HTML tags to parse and understand webpages, using inbound links to rank them, etc.

Cory Doctorow's essay, "Metacrap," does a great job of listing the reasons a Semantic Web-style metadata attempt will always fail when left to the "public" to implement. One thing that the old human-run Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project do get right are the quality of results, but since updates are made at the speed of human, these seem to be pretty much impossible to keep current.

Perhaps there is some neat way to use everyone's browsing histories to create a semantic link between content on the web. But that will never happen because of (extremely valid) privacy concerns.

Well, shame on the author for writing such a myopic rant piece containing no new ideas or proposals.

It is impossible to read this piece without getting coated with the dripping venom of regret. It's hearing an adolescent tell you why they really, really didn't want something that they didn't get and now envy.

What really gets me is this claim: "There's no more reason to expect search breakthroughs from Google than there is to expect electric car batteries to be made by Exxon."

Yet Google has overwhelmingly been responsible for the breakthroughs that essentially reduce our usage of their own product. Google themselves are trying to reduce our use of search. Over the past year they've added semantic canonical answers for many questions.

Years ago we really did have to go through pages of search. Now you seldom have to go past the first link, if you even need that.

It's also a bit laughable that he mentions Siri, betraying the gross agenda of the piece. Siri is a basic text parser that, if it fails at that, does a web search. It isn't some semantic knowledge engine, and in many of the scenarios in their own commercial, does a bog standard web search, relying upon all of the old tactics to give an answer. If Siri is the revolution, someone is misunderstanding how it works.

EDIT: 4 downvotes and not a single comment as to why. It is somewhat ridiculous how desperately so many on HN are to promote any vapid anti-Google screed, even when it comes from Microsoft of all places.

I wonder what kind of developers are they targeting? (as this blog is obviously targeting developers)

Do you have to properly hate something to be a good fit for Microsoft? Seems so, especially when you look at other campaigns (Gmail man reading your email etc.)

And then theres the grave accusation of Google distorting the search results, again with no evidence whatsoever.

This "former professor and startup founder" couldn't even come up with 5 or 10 test queries to prove his point.

But still this ad was well written, it tricked my built in spam filter and so i read it from start to end. Well done.

Share prices are not directly comparable. Market cap is, where MSFT is beating GOOG.