Google is so last year

Blog Posting November 29, 2011 by Adam Pode

Tags: Internet , Google , Bing , Duckduckgo , Blekko , ebsco , factiva , Lexis Nexis ,

Proquestion , Thomson Reuters

I am “old” enough to have lived through the dot.com bubble. After which a large number of

useful online resources and technologies disappeared because they could not answer the

question “who pays?” Google appears to have reached this same point. Why fund resources

such as the Wonder wheel, + searching, Google labs possibly even advanced searching and

most viewed news if they are not used and do not pay.

I understand the need for an income stream, after all if you do not sign up as a member for

the excellent research products that we offer, then I don’t get paid. However, this conundrum

does raise an interesting point. Where will analysts and other information professional go if

Google, which as we have discussed before represents 85% of searches currently, starts to

focus only on consumers.

There are no Google killers out there, but Marydee Ojala in an excellent presentation at the

Online Information Conference, did highlight some resources that may be of use to you.

Bing, we have already discussed, but there is also:

Blekko

Duck Duck Go

I predict paid search and the invisible web are about to have a second renaissance. Old

friends such as:

Ebsco

Factiva

Lexis Nexis

Proquest

Thomson Reuters

That we may have ignored for some time, as we googled it, are about to come back to

prominence.