Helpinghand - 3:49 pm on Jun 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

Ah, your talking about General all-purpose search. I find drilling through a massive engine time-consuming and although I use them, I get better results from specialist portals.

There are too many 'general' engines out there, and to be honest it annoys me whenever a new one crops up. They are nothing different, special or amazing than the next one, so I ignore every single one and refuse to use them, for I know what they deliever, and it's isn't what I want. I stick to maybe 2 major engines and a meta search if I'm very stuck. As for the rest - well they can carry on and ignore customer value for the next 20 years and make nothing.

Yell.com is big and all that, but I don't use them, nor do I use Thomson or webfinder (also owned by Thomson) etc. Yahoo does me fine as a starting point, but once I find another source, I even use that less and less.

I figure General search will be replaced soon enough by a string of highly specialised portals, engines and directories. Search advertising is too expensive, PPC is riddled with fraud and search is very untargeted. Oh, did I forget the mess of MFA, webmaster and personal/worship sites that invade and mess with my search experience.

Sorry but I'm a little disappointed with search at the moment, and don't see it improving much over the next 5 years. I'm 5 years on the web and haven't seen any of the majors do much expect add to their size and make bigger profits. It seems they have forgotten the searcher and advertisers.

What is the point of sending out a press release saying "Yahoo buys #*$!xx company" "profits are up for the year". Yeah, but what's in it for me - what have you done for me..... "Oh, we have bought another company" - "No - you bought it for you, not me!"

If we want free advertising, then let the engines know that if they don't provide it, we'll go elsewhere.

Take a stand, we have the power, we are the buyers.

Any thoughts on this anyone?

[edited by: Helpinghand at 3:55 pm (utc) on June 8, 2007]