There's something happening with search

After almost two decades of only niche activity among the pure content findability experts, suddenly the topic of search has been a big one in our recent conferences and peer group meetings.

It’s almost as if when Google was added to the English dictionary in 2006, progress stopped. I realise that’s unfair, also to Google, which arguably has made progress, but still for many years, two things were certain when it came to search: Google was the king and on most websites site search was broken.

It's clear that something is happening at the moment

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It’s the people using it that will make or break any search application

Too often we don’t find what we are looking for when using the organization’s own search application. Whether it’s on the corporate site or the intranet. As a result, we waste time, scrolling for the content or fleeing back to Google, because we accept a somewhat saddening fact; that Google has a seemingly better overview of our content than anyone in our own organization.  

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Even Google discontinues products

By Janus Boye

November brought bad news for all Livelyzens. In a brief blog post, Google officially announced that they would shut down Lively.com in order to "prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business"

Lively was one of many services that came from the Google Labs environment. The service was released in July 2008 and introduced an innovative, 3-D social platform, where users could build their own interactive rooms and embed them into web pages. But only 4 months later Lively was discontinued, leaving the active user community in a sad state.

As a response to the sudden lock-down, the community has created an online petition, which many have signed, adding comments like "Lively has given me so much - please don't shut it down" and "Lively is more than a chat in 3D. [...] it is a world of feelings." All a little sad really, in so many ways...

Yet while the shut-down is indeed sad for the many users, it is also a timely reminder that

  1. You need to be careful with any beta release.

  2. Vendors -- including big vendors more often than not -- sometimes discontinue offerings

The case with Lively illustrates that Google is a business just like any other and that businesses need to make money. As they themselves write on their blog: "[...] we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off. That's why [...] we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year."

In a future Google in the Enterprise Report, we plan to take a close look at Google based on our many on-going conversations with customers about their experiences. Thanks go to my colleague Peter Sejersen for his eagled eyed analysis of the Lively situation.