But search will eventually change all websites

Matt Chapman in Information World Review 01 Jun 2007, summarises John Batelle’s conversation at HP ’s Print 2.0 conference in New York.

Google is now the default interface for the web but will not always be the dominant point of access, “The web has an interface and I would argue that it is Google right now.”

“Search is that interface but it is not always going to be, just like it was not always DOS and it is not always going to be Windows.”

Batelle compared Google’s sparse homepage to the command line from DOS that was used to get information from a computer.

“Where are we now in search? Well, the command line, but with a huge difference: we are not talking in the computer’s language, we are talking in our language,” he said. So search is facilitating a conversation.

Batelle argued that the way search treats its users would eventually have wide-reaching effects for all websites.

“Think about what search does. You come to a place (Google, MSN, Yahoo, whatever), you say something and the whole place reorganises around what you just said,” he explained.

“And this is an interface that we are getting so used to that we are going to start getting mad at businesses that do not do that for us.”

See the videos at HP Corporate TV.