I was speaking to a family member. A savvy young woman in her early 40s who I would call an average computer user. Her work does not keep her at her screen 10 hours a day, in fact she uses her computer to augment her work and to support her personal needs (kids’ homework, occasional shopping, email etc). The rest of the time she works face-to-face with retail customers.  Here is what she said, “I hate Google, because when I go there to help my kids on their homework I just get shopping information. I don’t want to buy, I want to know. I use Wikkipedia.”

And there you have it. A regular Joe/Josephine who has discovered that there are other more effective places to get answers than Google. Google will go the way of the IBM. Too big, too cumbersome, too out of touch. Too worried about being gamed on a meta scale to deliver anything relevant on the user scale.

Enter Bing. A compelling hybrid. Ironically this Microsoft product learned a lesson from Apple: Beautiful to look at, solving a chosen group of user needs. It is clear that the folks at Bing asked themselves: what do users use search engines for most? The answer: Entertainment, News, Travel and Shopping. “Let’s place ourselves there in a most aesthetically pleasing and robust manner.” Bing will become the go-to consumer search site. But don’t go there to research your term paper, or to conduct any other type of muscular search. It just won’t return good information. And the truth is, neither does Google. It is only slightly better than Bing in that department. Doing robust deep research still involves endlessly long search phrases and serious poking around over an extended period of time.

We are actively engaged in researching new technologies here at Camarès and we are finding that it can take weeks and hundreds of searches on Google alone – never mind Wikkipedia, YouTube and other engines. Invariably we find our answers nested deep in blogs that are linked to each other and NOT as a direct result of a Google or Bing search. Our Josephine described the essence of the problem: “Half the time I don’t know the right question to ask.” Well the truth is she does know the right question and so do we at Camarès, it is the engines themselves that are not indexing information in a way that humans actually search for it. I call this the Nuance Gap. Humans are nuanced, search engines are not. And it is the one place that Google has consistently failed the user since day one.

Until Google bridges this gap (and my bet it will never, ever be able to do this) it will die a slow twisting death, nibbled away by more compelling vertical competitors. Right now it is skating on its huge cash reserves and the fact that companies are willing to auction up the price of keywords beyond anything that is affordable. It is also skating on all the other Joes & Josephines who have not yet changed their behavior, but will over time.  Traffic will diminish – in fact it already is. Right now, Google may simply be calling it “market saturation” but if it were doing its job right, it would have out Binged, Bing a long time ago.