All this talk about search…

Over at the Scobleizer there’s a raging war regarding one of Robert’s latest posts, in which he basically argues that Microsoft Live Search sucks.

I can’t say that I disagree, but really, all this talk about search engines gets me bored, tired, frustrated and disappointed. Why? What is it we’ve been discussing ever since Google left AltaVista in the dust? How to make search better. Faster. More accurate. More diverse in its features. Advertising techspeak and general geekery. I’m not to say it’s been bad – on the contrary. It’s been grand, and internet search is mainstram now.

And that’s my point. Every girl, boy and grown-up use search engines now. Every day. People I never expected to are even learning to do blog searches and other stuff that has been considered not mainstream for years. We don’t have to keep discussing the same things any longer and we certainly don’t need yet another search engine, be it Live.com or a9.com.

To my knowledge, there’s not a single person out there talking about how internet search can help businesses. What “internet search” means for businesses. How it affects, and can change, supply chain management – this is the buzz in ERP right now, and still nobody talks about how it can leverage search, or be catered by it.

What I’m saying is that search is a consumer product right now, and there’s a big market out there that are not consumers.

I think that there is a killer app to be found here, that might even be able to turn individual consumers into fully fledged businesses, at a scale and pace without precedence in history.

What do you think? Is internet search just for consumers, or is it time to start talking about how this can change businesses at a more concrete level?

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