For years now we have been led to believe that the only way we could find any useable information from the monstrosity called the Internet was to use Google. After all Google changed the way search was done didn’t it .. or did it really.

Maybe in the beginning days of its existence in a garage this might have been the case. The days when its founders hadn’t been swayed by the fortunes that were soon to come their way. These days though Google cares less about search that it does in becoming the biggest ad network in the global marketplace.

As they concentrate on building their ad fortunes and playing chicken with Microsoft they are leaving their soft underbelly wide open to attack from people who really believe that search is the important internet medium that Google once believed in.

In a post today Om Malik quoted Jimmy Wales from something he said in December 2006:

“Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken,” Wales said back in December 2006, when Wikia launched Search Wikia effort. “Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency.”

To that I would add one more thing: when does search finally produce personally valuable and relevant information.

While terms like semantic search and human powered search are being bandied about as the next step in the world of search I wonder if the time isn’t coming when search finally and truly becomes something that we have personal control over.

It’s not like hardware or bandwidth are a limiting factor anymore in this day of 400gig hard drives for less than a hundred was when Google first started. On top of that unlike back then there is software available that could equitably handle the back-end needs.

There is no reason why search can’t go personal even today but everyone is so hooked on the chase Google game and the possible mega billions at stake. As a result the consumer is being left with what is slowly becoming an antiquated method of finding the information they want. Information that isn’t being increasingly polluted with advertising and spamming.

True open sourced search is the one that we the searchers have control over regardless of the platitudes coming from Google or even Jimmy Wales. We just need some-one to give us the keys to our new personal assistant - user controlled search.

Listening to: Tangerine Dream - Legend - Opening

Conversation Tags: Search, Google, Wikia, Jimmy Wales, Om Malik