Every once in a while you run across a web site that has many of the desirable aspects you might look for in design and simplicity. These days there seems to be so much clutter on most sites without thought to what's really trying to be done. BuyLightFixtures.com is a Minnesota lighting company and has one of those sites which has the simple attitude when people are looking to buy light bulbs or light fixtures. We like this site for how it makes navigation easy with good images and fast load times. Would this be the best way for a search engine to find and spider a site? Does the navigation make a difference when it comes to getting the information found by spiders and in-turn being found by searchers? Most of the time the answer is yes, but it should be interesting to see how this plays out with this particular web site.

Google has done something I don't get, started an instant messaging service. Why would they even bother to do such a thing? They made thier way in the world of search, why go back to the old portal concept like Yahoo or MSN? Is it really that important in the overall scheme of things to have exactly what everyone else has? I don't think so. Companies do line extension at thier own peril into areas they have no business in. I'm not saying the Google IM idea is bad, but it brings into question the management style of doing everything just because you can. That's the problem with most technology companies, because of high innovation being the standard, they think they must do everything they can possibly do. Yahoo, MSN and AOL all have good instant messaging not to mention ICQ. In this very mature area of IM, it's late to be jumping in. This won't be a success for Google because it isn't what people have come to know Google for which is great search results. It's too bad too because it was getting to look like they could never make a bad move, but what do you know, Google is showing itself to be truly "human".

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This recent article talks about the problem of search engine clutter and what some people are doing about it. There are simple ways to alleviate the problem of tons of results for certain things you type in. The article talks about PreviewSeek.com which sounds like a search aggregator or like a meta search engine. These aren't anything new, but they offer some solutions, but it's not complete. Some of the best things I've seen are the search engines that do clustering of reults into logical groups. This is the only thing that makes good sense right now, knowing the group or category your results belong in will give you more concentrated choices. If you're interested in this, try Clusty.com, I found it to be one of the most helpful search engines to find something beyond what I may have been searching for, and faster.

Search engine results really aren't clutter, they are the results. Which is what I've said all along that search results will become a commodity with companies dressing it them up to suit thier needs. This trend will continue, but no one will kill the major producer of commodity search results, Google. I wish they would stop talking like this, it's dumb.

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Recent information shows that Google continues to te the search engine market by 2 to 1 over nearest rival, Yahoo. But does it matter who is on top of the search engine game. Well, it matters to Google when they can command a premium for paid ads, and I imagine Yahoo looks at it the same. Apart from that, does it matter to the average searcher? I would put to you that it doesn't. It's all about relevant results and I'm sure that most searchers don't care so much about the entity as whether they find what they're looking for. The future could be stolen from Google if the results were just more relevant or easier to use. I don't think people are so loyal to a search engine as much as they are loyal to what they want to find. Whoever can provide those results will be the winner in the future. Although it's harder to capture mindshare after the inital phase of search engine exuberance, it might still be possible to take a siginificant share of the market if the idea is better. It's always been that way no matter what the product or service.

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This might be a trend for the future as browsers of various types become more common, partnerships with search engines. In this case, Answers.com will be the search engine of choice for Opera's web portal. In case you don't know, Answers.com is the offshoot idea of the people who brought you GuruNet, a very fine tool for searching deeper into all kinds of content. This knid of arrangement is not unlike A9.com incorporating Google into search but creating a whole new experience. This is where the search engine becomes a commodity and people dress it up for thier user base enhancing the customer or user experience.

Opera is a great browser and you have to give them credit. They had a business of selling browsers when everyone else was giving them away. They understood what people wanted and what they didn't want and created a whole loyal section of Internet customers.

According to this article, MSn is making some gains in the search engine arena. It's good to see even if you're not a big fan of Microsoft. The increase of competition means that better results and ideas will come out of the whole search engine competition. As I've stated before, one should never count out the Redmond monster when it comes to ting a market. I'm sure that Google and Yahoo haven't. If you take a look at the results page for MSN, you find some great results that are in some ways more relevant than either Google or Yahoo.

When it comes to search, the battle is only beginning. Look for many changes over the next year and a breakout of a smaller search engine as well. There's still a lot of room for growth and slicing up a piece of the searching public for your entity. What I found interesting in the article is the number of toolbar searches and how well Yahoo does. Yahoo has something Google doesn't, a base of loyal people that go beyond search and live in Yahoo's many offerings.

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It was bound to happen that Google will be a more pervasive entity on our desktops in the coming future. They've got a Word add-in which can publish Word documents directly to a blog. This along with the other things they're doing are making them more ubiquitous than ever, such as GoogleEarth. It's an interesting contest between these two companies as to which will take away space from the other's traditional territory. No one knows for sure yet, but Google seems to have an advantage because of it's agility, not being bogged down by some of the other things that Microsoft must do and support in the OS.

Search was just the beginning of all this change in the software industry, now there are any number of ways that this could morph. In the next few years we won't even recognize search the way we do today, it will be different. We will looks back on these days and think how primitive all this was. But who will be the major players? No one knows anything right now, as things are still in thier infancy believe it or not.

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Recently, Yahoo has been claiming another jump in search engine indexing. This has about the same effect as McDonald's signs had years ago. I remember that the signs would show 1 billion served and then it would go up again and again. Wow, we all thought, that really is something. But really it wasn't anything, just a cusrious fact which had nothing to do with the quality of their food, service or anything. It was just a number. It's the same with Yahoo or any other search engine, it's not the number of pages indexed, it's the quality of the algorithm itself that matters. Are you getting relevant search results or not? Is your business seeing results on the web? No one really cares about these numbers, because out of context they are meaningless. Let's just face the fact that these search spiders are very busy and they go through a lot of pages!

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