One facet of the future of search (apropos Go ogle & searchablebooks)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject:        One facet of the future of search (apropos Google & searchablebooks)
Author: Ross Stapleton-Gray <ross () stapleton-gray com>
Date:           14th December 2004 12:53:55 pm

[for the IP list, apropos the discussion of Google & searchable books]

In examining this latest development, re Google & searchable books, it's 
interesting to contemplate "where the money is;" Google's venture into 
searchable books somewhat parallels Amazon's "inside the book" search... 
neither are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, so we ought to 
figure out just where they'll be taking their cut, and what the grander 
implications for search & e-commerce may be.

The Amazon case is presumably simpler: they'd like you to end up paying 
Amazon more money by buying more books.  If Amazon controls the search, it 
can hand you off to a preferred source for the books you might then like... 
as a bookseller, that's pretty straightforward.  It's worth noting, though, 
that Amazon "fronts" for a lot of other retailers (including Target.com), 
so its interests will be broader than just what appears on Amazon.com.

Google is presumably more "retailer neutral," as more (most?) of their 
revenues will come from whomever pays them to be positioned most 
prominently in front of the searcher.  In the case of books out of 
copyright and available in full text, Google can reap its usual rewards 
through coupling advertising to the results (maybe holidays in Britain when 
the search is on Shakespeare?); in the case of books where the Google 
results can only be citations, and perhaps short excerpts, it'll be a more 
interesting question.

But this is a useful lead-in to a phenomenon I think we'll see emerge in 
search & e-commerce: a sharper division into two distinct stages, those 
being "What do I really want?," and "Where can I best get it?"  Google and 
Amazon's searches both allow me to dig deeply into books, and determine 
what it is I really want.  What books, for example, reference "Sartre," 
"Marcel Marceau," and "lima beans?"  Both can tell me, and will likely (if 
such books actually exist) produce results that are pointers to books under 
copyright.  Those pointers could (and should) be unique identifiers, i.e., 
ISBNs or UPCs (or, after January 1, 2005, the UPC's successor the Global 
Trade ID Number, or GTIN... the world is standardizing on a slightly longer 
code for use in the bar codes you see on consumer packaged goods).  Amazon 
may obfuscate this... its own Amazon Serial ID Numbers (ASINs) don't look 
like a UPC any more, though they used to.

But I suspect that there'll be an evolution toward searches that produce 
unique handles--and the product codes that every manufacturer and retailer 
understands are the best candidates--and then a "find" phase that can query 
sources (retailers, libraries, etc.) through the use of such compact, 
standard and universally-recognized handles.  Google will probably welcome 
such a delineation; it's more of a threat to Amazon, which would like to 
avoid a situation where goods are directly comparable across retail sources 
(including, perhaps, your local brick & mortar store, which could be 
rendered "Internet-ready" just by publishing its inventory to some service 
as a set of UPC codes... if the world behaved in the sort of "define then 
find" model described above).

A couple of pointers to discussion of this:

My recent white paper for CommerceNet, on "Leveraging Product Codes in 
Internet Commerce:" http://zlab.commerce.net/wiki/images/8/8e/CN-TR-04-06.pdf

An article in the NYT, on "The Augmented Bar Code:" 
www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/12AUGMENTED.html
(here the focus is on 3rd-party information... so I like this product, but 
what about its environmental friendliness, etc.?  One you have canonical 
IDs for stuff, you can hang all varieties of descriptive content and 
critique off them.)

An announcement from shopping meta-search service Dulance, on the 
availability of product offer information as RSS feeds: 
http://www.dulance.com/pressreleases/rss-shopping.html

Ross



-----

Ross Stapleton-Gray, Ph.D., CISSP
Stapleton-Gray & Associates, Inc.
http://www.stapleton-gray.com



-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com
To manage your subscription, go to
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/