Google is a brilliant search engine and it’s now very infrequent I have to go outside the top 3 links when I am searching for a specific topic or product. There are notable exceptions:
Forum Search
I found BoardReader a few days ago and I have been very impressed by the results. Chat forum search is something I’ve been looking at for ages and wishing for a better way to search them.
Blog Search
OK, Google’s own blog search is useful (principally because the spam is minimised which Technorati is shocking for) but Technorati is still my first choice when searching for blogs due to tag & authority scores. Unfortunately I feel time may soon be up for Technorati.
Yahoo and Google have local engines but Yelp have built a great platform. My business, BView, has taken business search in a different direction by i)going for results across the entire spectrum of businesses (not just the 40% that service consumers) and layering in proprietary & public access data.
Google has reviews but BView and Yelp actually allow personal relevance by layering in your personal social fabric while BView has also added the businesses themselves to the social graph.
A search on Linkedin & Facebook produce results for “normal” people and allow me to get a feel for their friend set. 192.com searches across the electoral register producing a match for me and my wife (indeed, I used this to research the owners of my house prior to buying it). I have seen some nice aggregators emerging and I expect some big things in this area.
I guess these are niche areas which Google may eventually get round to but it highlights some niche areas where I would ignore Google. The same applies to auctions/classifieds where Ebay can get killed in niche areas because of it’s structure and lack of flexibility.
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