American writer Thomas Peters once said: “Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing… layout, processes and procedures.” I find it hard to disagree with the man. With regards to social media tools there is one website that stands out head and shoulders for its simplicity and sparseness in design, and its unflinching ability to provide you with instant results. You might have heard of it: Google.
I’ve been using Google for almost ten years now and I remember thinking two things when I first came across it: one that this was one of the most useful tools I’d ever encountered. And two, enjoy it while it lasts because there’s no revenue stream. No way of making money out of it. How wrong was that!
One of the most striking things about Google is its homepage. From the outset Larry Page and Sergey Bring (Google’s Founders) were determined to keep the site clean. I read somewhere that they even used to count how many words were on the homepage, pledging never to have more than 37 words on it at any one time. Obsessive? Yes. Pedantic? Maybe. Successful? Abso-bloody-lutely!
But behind that simple homepage is a wealth of free features for users to get stuck into, from Google’s mail facilities, to its controversial (some would say intrusive) geographical tools. It’s that depth that has seen Google sitting pretty at the zenith of the recent Top 100 Global Brands survey conducted by BrandZ, valuing the company at an astonishing $100 billion. It’s no surprise then that others want a piece of the big G’s market. Only today Twitter Search announced a major revamp that’ll see it including search through links inside tweets and ranking your tweets by user reputation. Stephen Wolfram believes his computational knowledge engine, WolframAlpha, will provide a better way of executing certain types of search queries than Google. That’s not going live until later this month, but there are plenty of pretenders to Google’s throne out there: Cuil, True Knowledge and Kosmix. Even Ask Jeeves has come back in full butler garb to try his luck.
Whether these other search engines will get a look in is debatable. Google isn’t perfect by any means, but I challenge you to find another company that provides as many useful tools as Google for free. And to think, I thought this little $100 billion dollar company wouldn’t make money…