My Life and the Internet
Hard to believe it, but I’ve working in the internet world for 10 years now. I started out selling analytics packages from a company called Aquas. At the time, they were competition for a young company called WebTrends. I guess we know who won THAT battle!
My pre-internet life was in the music business as a talent agent at the Tahoe Agency, so I always wanted to bring my love of music online. I started to work on something called Zooka and the plan was to get all of my music biz buddies to write reviews of CDs and concerts as well as provide a directory of agencies, labels, management companies, venues and distributors. I got a lot of “Hell yeah!”s, but when push came to shove, I couldn’t get people to contribute. The biggest problem was that most people weren’t savvy enough to write and post that stuff.
Now that concept has been done a million times. It’s EASY now. Sure creating is still hard work but putting it online is a snap! There’s FREE software now for all of those things! Publishing and the media published has come such a long way!
I’m not sure I could say as much for Search. Tell me, what’s your favorite search engine? 65% of you will say Google, according to all sorts of fancy reports. But why? Can you tell me what is different about Google’s results from Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask, Lycos, even AltaVista? It’s still all about the all-mighty keyword. All still get their algorithms gamed. The results, despite all the differences, are still pretty similar.
Search for ‘plush teddy bears’…
Google’s results
Yahoo’s results
MSN’s results
AOL’s results
Ask’s results
Lycos’ results
AltaVista’s results
Seriously, look at them. They’re almost all the same. The only difference I saw was that Lycos (URL is clip of their old commercial) is shamelessly filling the majority of the page with sponsored results and showing only a few natural results at the bottom in an attempt to retain what little is left of their integrity.
10 years from when I started. We’ve got video. We’ve got social networks. We’ve got blogs. We’ve got great advancements in sharing and collaboration. And despite all the proclamations of advances in search, they’re all still showing pretty much the same things as the next guy.
