Phil Bradley's Blog

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

 

Interesting article at Silicon.com which is an interview with Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy. He says that Google has dumbed down searching, and uses an example of someone who needs to know about the effect of oil pollution on the penguin population of Alaska simply typing in 'penguin'. Well actually, I don't believe that most people would do that. Even if they do, that's not the fault of Google, which has provided some reasonable tools to use when searching. It's like complaining that a DIY store has dumbed down DIY because someone goes in a buys a hammer to knock a screw in. You can have the most advanced search engine in the world, but you can't be blamed if people do poor searches.

He also talks about other advances in technology which are already happening or have been announced as though they are some sort of visionary approach that he's just discovered. I loved the bit where he says 'search is going to become a lot more than typing words into a box. It's going to be become about alerting'. This would have been a really interesting and visionary comment say 4 years ago. Now it's history, yet he's trying to make out that it's something new and exciting.

I think he's spent too much time in his office, and not enough wandering around seeing what's going on. Very disappointing comments from someone who should know better.

Phil 9:34 AM