Eoin Purcell's Blog

Rajat, in a comment on my “two Digital Debate Camps” post, takes me to task for my pessimism on search saying:

Search is already getting fragmented. No doubt google still is a giant but it may lose its position fast. People are using verticals for their specific search queries.

I think that in future a common guy will rely all the more less on search. He will be using peer communities for reading the best on the web. MySpace already accounts for 7% of search traffic and that is huge.

Hence the dominance of Google as a big giant gatekeeper is getting reduced by each passing day.

I was tempted to write a post disagreeing wholeheartedly with him. But then Steve Ruebel’s Micropersuasion drove me to this site Tagfetch which offers users the ability to search the web for content tagged with certain tags. You can see the results below for a search on the tag: Publishing.

So perhaps the future of search is not Google. However, and this is key, the future is search and the danger is that one or a small number of gatekeepers will impose themselves between content and the consumers of content.

Rajat highlights MySpace and as I have said before MySpace is already a huge publisher and while you may as a member search within it and for items outside the last thing you want to do is lock your content inside. The recent controversy over artists taking their music down from the site shows us that its not all roses there.

So while Rajat may have allayed my fears over Google somewhat (And I am still of two minds on them, one the one hand I love their search strength but fear their dominance of the medium) he has not allayed my fears that some gatekeepers will emerge with a remarkably strong weapon to bar those gates, Search.

But a bigger overall fear is that from now on no matter what type of content you produce you need to be on top of technology. I wonder how many authors know what a tag is and how to tag their latest chapter? How many understand the dynamics of search and how to optimize their writing for it? Why should they need to?

Search is the future and so we all need to be Technologists now, writers, publishers, editors and, in time consumers. It is inevitable if we are going to persist to follow this path forward. Part of me cannot help but wonder if that is a good thing.