Google is still the mot important search engine in town. The unofficial google blog has issued a list of market share for google per country. In Europe the percentage is almost entirely above 90% (with all the consequences this has for SEM). The good thing is that you can google use for everything, because its spiders crawls everywhere. But sometimes I have the impression that it has become too simple (and I am not the only one to be dissatisfied). So this past weekend I found myself dreaming about some sub-googles. Or baby-googles. Or boxes. Babygoogles in boxes. Boxed babygoogles.

I was searching for “targeting technologies”. First problem: my IP is from Spain, so google makes me by default Spanish and kind of pre-organizes the results favoring the Spanish links. Set it to English. Now the results are mixed between marketing/advertising related and other stuff, especially molecular targeting technologies seem to be very popular these days. Of course I can narrow the search down to “targeting technologies -molecular”, than excluding cancer as well, and genetics, and well… until I get to exactly the results I want and need. Though on my exclusion crusade I have probably also excluded some relevant links.

So this is the idea. While google is crawling the web anyway, they could also put the content they found into boxes. Big transparent boxes. For example, all website that are related to marketing (whichever form of marketing) should be labeled marketing. Than on the google page I can decided whether to search in google (on the web) or whether I stick with one of the babygoogles. If I only want marketing related results anyway, I’d go to babygoogle marketing. No molecular technologies mixed into my results.

Just make the boxes as transparent as possible (e.g. the babygoogle marketing includes all websites that include a defined number of words) and let your users offer more boxes that are needed.

Or even better… make users create their boxes. But without hassling though the excluding in the search query. And then, next time I look for targeting technologies, I only get websites which are actually relevant to my search. Hopefully.

• musings