Why we don’t need yet another search engine

After the spectacular success of Google as a search engine, people are waiting for the next big revolution in “Search”. As one of my readers pointed out, waiting for ‘Search 2.0′. But is search the exact thing that we need?

When Google introduced their search, people thought that it was the best solution to manage the overwhelming amount of data they have. Many corporations started using the Google search appliance. Still, lots of people are happy with what Google provides them. People use Google desktop search in their personal computers to search for their documents. In Gmail, the tagline used is “search, don’t sort”. But I think there is a problem with this solution.

Assume that you are the kind of person who uses the internet a lot for your reading and research. You may be saving lots of web pages, images and other stuff in your computer. You don’t sort your data because you can use the Google desktop to find the data you need, when you need it. But what about the data you forget about?

Assume that you downloaded an important document to your computer and saved it for later reference. You can search for the document if you don’t remember its location. What if you forget about the document itself? What if you don’t even remember that you downloaded it? This occurs to a lot of people, in one way or the other. Sometimes we may conceive a very good business (or whatever) idea and we save the idea to a file, and later forget about it. Sometimes a friend sends us an e-mail about something important and we forget about it. All of us saves different types of files to our local hard disk or to our web servers and loses track of these documents. We loses contact details, to-do lists, technical files, business proposals and all sorts of files somewhere in our hard disks. After some days (or years) when browsing randomly through our computer, we will find the files which are of no use then.

So sorting and organizing files according to their contents and relevancy is the key to increase our productivity. Searching comes only second to sorting. Searching is only needed when we know the contents or name of a file. But sorting and organizing data is needed always and everywhere.

The same thing applies to the internet also. We need applications that sort and organize the data in the web and present it to users according to relevancy – Before they search for it !!! For example, when I open the website to this application, it must say:

“Good Morning Niyaz. Today you have to write a new article for your blog. Yesterday you saved two webpages for this, one on Cryptography and the other on AJAX. Also, if you are trying to complete the web designing work for Mr.X, consider using the ‘php script for compression’ you saved last month. You may also visit www.davidairey.com to get some design ideas”

The above paragraph may not be the way a real organizer will present you the data, but I think it conveys the overall message. Also note that this is not a to-do list generator. It is more than that. It finds relevant data for you in your PC and the internet and shows it appropriately. When somebody develops an application of this type, we will not need a search engine anymore.