MediaSavvy

Search engine expert Danny Sullivan reviews the search engines of the past and present, with some hints for what is to come, on Clickz.

It’s easy to forget, in this Google-centric universe, how many search engines there have been, and how ruthlessly Darwinian was the process that led to the current situation.

I was surprised by the degree and speed of the consolidation in the business over the last five years, probably because I underestimated the cost of upgrading and maintaining a working search engine relative to the (short term) costs of simply buying the results. The trend toward paid listings will no doubt hasten consolidation because it requires a very new kind of selling infrastructure.

However, the sheer number of players and the low (in absolute terms) price of doing it yourself drive down the value of even a consolidated property.That’s what former high-flyer Inktomi discovered and what Overture is discovering.

The first time I went to work at a newspaper, I was startled by how much it was like a factory. Inspired by Chris Gulker, Tim Porter tracks a lot of the current purposelessness of the newspaper business to its factory mentality.

Of course, every newspaper contains a real factory — its printing presses churn out hundreds of tons of news and advertising every day, and its fleet of trucks deliver them to doorsteps in a coverage area of thousands of square miles.

Inside the news factory, productivity is sometimes measured in inches and not in insights. Sure, there may be a surprise in your local news package, but the rest of it is as surprising as a Happy Meal.

The factory mindset pervades newspapers like a grimy fungus. It manifests itself in rote stories scheduled by calendar (Hey, it’s August, time for back-to-school features) and sourced by a familiar rolodex of people who will take reporters’ calls. [ Read: Robert Thompson watches TV for a living, Salon ]; advertising staffs that rely on revenue from department stores and national brands while driving away local, community-based businesses with exorbitant ad rates (thereby creating an advertising product that is of little use to the actual residents in the market); and IT departments that hard-wired entire enterprises to legacy platforms and proved to be more truculent than defense contractors when nimbler technologies arrived.

The newsroom itself is perhaps the most factory-minded of all. It values tradition over invention; it sets deadlines to maximize press-room or distribution efficiency while compromising quality of content (can’t get the big game in the sports final? too bad); it continues to embrace managerial hierarchies that emphasize “dues-paying,” discourage collaboration and drive journalists to think they can actually improve their professional lot by aligning with the Teamsters when contract time comes around

I never imagined so many talented, creative, smart, funny, insightful, knowledgeable people could produce an editorial product of such stultifying banality as the typical daily newspaper.

There are about 1500 daily newspapers in America. Why do they all look the same? They’ve learned their ways from one another a long time ago, probably before you were born.

The next revolution is still up for grabs. Technology has empowered a lot of writers and reporters to be their own publishers. But, there are also plenty of economic reasons why future Internet news media and the networks they run on could be more concentrated–and even more like factories.

The real problem with the economy now is uncertainty.

What’s going to happen to the economy? How will the war affect the economy? How will the war affect advertising? How will the war affect gas prices? How about tech spending? What happens if the war takes an unexpected turn? How much will it cost to put Iraq back together, if we’re given the opportunity? What if there is a major act of terrorism? What the hell is going on with North Korea?

Scott Rosenberg’s “Eve of Destruction” DaveNet essay encapsulated a lot of my concerns. We have no clue what will happen over the next ten days, ten months, or ten years, and GWB is presenting victory as a foregone conclusion. The White House has discussed alternative outcomes internally, but none have been suggested to the citizens. The big lesson of war is that the outcome is usually a surprise. If it weren’t, there’d be fewer and shorter wars. Certainly the last ten years have taught us not to underestimate Saddam Hussein.

Generally, I feel that the president doesn’t have a lot of control over the economy. But GWB has a lot of options for reducing the amount uncertainty in the world. For some time he has been increasing the amount of uncertainty. In such an uncertain market, what are the odds that you’re going to do any hiring?