I want you to do something. Search on PLAY on Yahoo, Google, and MSN. Here, I made it easy. Here in a nutshell is why Google continues to get hyped by everyone including me (notice who I work for).
PLAY on Google.
Google suprises you. Delights you. Gives you what you want (not always, but more often than the other engines).
Now, quick, tell me why I was searching for PLAY? Was I looking for a fun game to play? No. I was trying to get the stock price for PLAY, which stands for PortalPlayer, Inc.
Hey Steve Ballmer, you want me to switch from Google to MSN? It’s these little things that make it very difficult.
Now, here’s the rub. Doing these kinds of things are pretty tough for search engine companies, which is why you don’t see them on every query. They require development time to do, and they require processor power to produce, integrate, and display (and they potentially could slow down display of search results which would be a bad thing). MSN is doing them too in some searches. Here, search the three for “Ichiro Suzuki.”
Now here is a place where MSN is a clear winner.
So, I’ve been thinking about this a bit today and talked with Dave Winer and he said “why don’t you open up the search engine?” and let developers build these tiles/experiences that could plug into the engine for specific results?
It would be fairly easy for MSN to open up its engine to let me hook into these spots. Now, let’s say MSN would pay for the best tiles? How would they do that? Well, if I built a tile, for, say, New York Hotels that got a lot of business, we could do a revenue sharing thing. Sorta like how Google pays Chris Pirillo to put its ads on his blog.
MSN could even rotate tiles and keep only the ones that actually get users to click on it.
If you owned Google/Yahoo or MSN, how would you get more of these little info tiles into your search engine?
Oh, one thing that Google is missing on PLAY? Where’s the RSS feed? I’d like to subscribe to that tile and get notified at the end of every day what the stock price is.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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