Seeing Beyond The Obvious
Lets looks beyond whats established & comfortable.
“Let’s google it” is a common thing to say and do. I am seeing a very interesting trend of adding new modalities to the notion of “searching”. And, most of us tend to overlook this new trend in search because we are overly used to and comfortable using Google. We often fail to look at whats beyond Google and take other innovations for granted.
I have noticed three new kinds of search —
Fast Company recently did a profile on Giphy. It said —
Giphy envisions itself as more than just a place for gifs. That’s why it’s obsessed with the moment that gifs capture — because the moment is bigger than the gif. The moment is emotion. “You never search ‘happy’ on Google,” Chung says. But you can on Giphy. So what is Giphy, to him? It’s the beginning of a different kind of search engine, one based on experience instead of information. “You don’t get too many opportunities to compete with Google,” he says. “We competed and we beat them at the gif search. And you’ve seen the office — it’s pretty small. There’s not too many of us. So imagine if we had thousands of people.”
Now, thats super fascinating. Giphy is growing into an emotion-based search. I think thats very powerful and timely given the recent outburst of visual communications in the form of pictures, videos, emojis and, well, GIFs. We search for information in Google. We can now search for emotions and temporal expressions in Giphy.
I find myself searching for GIFs so frequently these days. Often times, more than I “google” for searching for information.
Biz Stone wrote in a blog post about Jelly —
Jelly is the only search engine in the world with an attitude, an opinion, and the experience to back it up. Only Jelly can say you asked the wrong question, provide answers you didn’t think to ask, and deliver a thoughtful answer to your anonymous query. Jelly is humanity presented as software. Search as we know it now is 20 years old. Jelly is #NextSearch.
Jelly has officially launched now. Jelly indexes people. It gives us answers that are given by people who are in the best position to answer our questions. Google is still best for factual information & getting to places on the web that have content on topics we are broadly looking for. Jelly seems to something that we would turn to for judgement-based answers. Its subjective. Its human. Its dynamic.
Thirdly, I think Pocket has tremendous potential of making a well-refined search engine of high quality and filtered articles. Its very unknown. I find it very useful. Google gives us lots of click bait links and sources that help us with nothing. Pocket’s search is amazingly helpful.
The interesting, and potentially vulnerable, part of this kind of search is the fact that its deeply based on our reading habits and who we follow within the app.
I am excited for these new kinds of search. We have trained our minds to associate “search” with google. I am not saying there’s anything wrong with that but that line of thinking stops us from exploring and accepting different types of search.
To put things in perspective, we have trained ourselves to think of Amazon as a retail website. We often ignore its rapidly growing business and offering even thought its available to us freely if you are a prime subscriber.
Same mindset applies in every industry and use case. We tend to overestimate an aggressive app or service or product’s potential and underestimate the newer, younger or perhaps, the lesser aggressive player. We tend to think more about Instagrams, Ubers and Spotifys of the world while thinking less of Pinterests, Lyfts and Pandoras of the world.
I think its important to look beyond what services we are accustomed to using. Curiosity about new things can help us innovate our own workflows and help us become more productive, well-informed and, well, technologically savvy.
