Looking for a shortcut on Labor Day? Guess again.

So since this is Labor Day weekend, let’s talk about labor savings techniques. When people refer to labor they normally refer to manual labor, as in this is a labor saving technique. Another example of this would be labor savings in terms of saving time with processes that we deal with every day, millions of times per day.

The example I’m referring to is Google. Every day there are millions of people searching for information several times per day, and each search return has millions of results. Now of course the fact that everyone is really only looking for one result doesn’t seem to enter into the equation. This is a very engineering centric view of an end-users need for information. We know you’re only looking for one answer, but you know what? We have technology to deliver 50 million answers to your one question, so here they are. And by the way we delivered the additional 49,999,999 answers in less than half a second. Cool, huh?

This seems like an area that is ripe for labor saving opportunities. The problem I’ve always had with Google is that it provides tremendous depth, no breadth, and very siloed information. I can get millions of text returns, or I can get millions of image returns, or I can get millions of query returns for video (and don’t forget all the advertising I also receive as part of my “experience”). What I don’t seem to get is the answer to my question. What I would really like is an accurate answer delivered in multiple media types. Don’t assume I like getting information in text format. Frankly, most people are visually oriented, and as I’ve said before, a picture is worth a thousand words. In my case (and I’d bet most people’s case) combining both images and text that answer the same question would be a really efficient information delivery experience.

As it stands now, the vast range of search returns forces me into browse mode, which is fine if I have the time to cruise around the web (which I never do). Like most people, I am in a hurry, anything that saves me time and labor is good, browsing millions of returns does not do anything for me, other than slow me down.

There are some interesting search alternatives out there that are taking a stab at a more integrated (or clustered) search returns, one is a company called Grokker, which was spun out of a company I worked for several years ago. They offer a very cool mapping interface, and a very nice clustering of information that pulls out relationships that are often not obvious. Another interesting site I just came across is Tafiti, which has a beta version of a Silverlight based rich media search tool, which tried to combine books, news, RSS feeds, and images into a single user experience (unfortunately no video)

Let me point out I am not criticizing Google, any company that can go from zero to a zillion dollars in revenue almost instantly (in relative terms) has obviously done something right, but there is always something new and interesting lurking around the corner; at one point not that long ago Google was a tiny shop and Alta Vista (remember them?) was the king of the hill.