Do we always even know? The more I think about the “up and coming” engines, I have to wonder who will be the first genius to consolidate our human desire for getting what we want when we want it with our desire to poke around on the internet.
Reading through random articles on Wikipedia is, of course, a very popular phenomena and the entire premise of Digg is built around discovering new sites, stories, and hilarious pictures and sharing them with others. Sure, we can browse the Digg feeds by some very general categories, but the site became popular because it exposed people to things they didn’t know they were looking for.
Rand posted on Del.icio.us being an engine that’s already better than Google because it makes a certain amount of suggestions for you and, depending on your demographic, those suggestions can be pretty hip. In a way, then, Del.icio.us is doing what I’m talking about: combining search function with a surprise factor that their users create with the popular tags. They just aren’t a trusted search engine yet.
My concern rests in the constant talk about engines trying to nail human linguistics to the point where they really really understand what you meant to type: even if you’re drunk, haven’t advanced past the third grade, or insist on searching with one word. I’m not sure if and how they could ever do this, but that seems to be the goal. And I’m not saying it shouldn’t be. I’m fascinated by these possibilities and the intelligence and technology it would take to realize them, but I’m saying that we shouldn’t eliminate all elements of surprise. Perhaps in an Ask-like format, a new engine (or good old Google?) should reserve a certain portion of the SERP for results from Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, or Technorati alongside the tried and true (and increasingly dead-on) results. The results can only get so good. We’re going to want a little more than that.
