madcow writes “Kevin Kelly asserts that “The value of web search is in the hundreds of billions. But what is most interesting to me, is that this huge “industry,” this huge appetite, has materialized out of nowhere. If we ask 800 billion questions today and expect to get instant answers, where were those 800 billion questions 20 years ago?”
The other classic search route is the library. US libraries in the 1990s counted about 1 billion library visits per year. Out of those 1 billion, about 300 million were “reference transactions,” or questions. We could be generous and count any visit to the library a “search,” as in searching for a book or topic.
“Search has been considered a non-essential luxury. But once it becomes ubiquitous, good, and free, we will find it is no longer a luxury but essential. As long as there are biz models that will deliver this good for free, this value will be hidden. The free in fact disguises its value.
I believe we are at a cusp where we become increasingly dependent on search.””
Idiot
I think he missed some vital stuff
1) libraries and yellow pages don’t often carry porn
2) in the dawn of the www when millions started to connect any idiot could (and did) ask questions on usenet – I didn’t see that in his calcs – one of the most frequent was where can I find or how can I find – so the demand was there but not satisfied
3) did he count the number of times people stopped asking each other how to find something and now ask a computer instead
4) as per 2) – many people tried to build search engines – altavista, yahoo, ask jeeves but precisely because the need was identified with wildly proliferating sites – it didn’t materialise out of thin air. I remember trying them all – was even a member of the e-group google friends before it converted to a yahoo group becuae it looked it held promise.
Don’t forget gopher, wais existed for a reason
“Part of the increasing value in providing answers lies in the fact that past questions and past correct answers increase the value of the corpus.”
Most of which is not directly provided by the engine(s) itself.