Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Desktop Search's Slow Fade Into History
Google looks like it will continue to dominate the search industry. Without a MicroHoo to contend with, GOOG will keep on defining search marketing. Such influence on the market is not the healthiest environment for innovation and for search marketers.
But Search Insider's Steven Baldwin thinks that desktop search will someday be far less significant than search outside of PCs. He thinks that search from consoles, TVs, and mobile will have much more impact (eventually) than desktop search.
Microsoft's impotence in gaining a share of desktop search has now become capitulation, according to Baldwin.
While it may be overstating the case to say that Microsoft has already conceded the desktop-browser search battle to Google, it’s clear that winning this short-term battle is less important than prevailing in the long, multiplatform war that’s to come.
Google does not assume that desktop search will be the world's fattest cash cow forever, but I think it has more milk to give than Baldwin suggests. Desktop search in its existant form will give way to new ways of natural language search, and technologies such as RSS and Wikis are making search less important.
But search from mobile devices and consoles will never be as important to business marketers as the desktop. For the b2b space, looking for information from a PC will remain dominant. Until we find a user interface for mobile devices that is superior to a keyboard, that is.
Posted By John Gartner at 10:04 AM
Permanent Link: Desktop Search's Slow Fade Into History
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