iMediaConnection: SearchTHIS: Clutter, Relevancy, & Search

Kevin Ryan makes some good points in today's imediaconnection about the continuing quest of the search engines to "be everything to everyone."

It's funny - yesterday I was rereading through some of Google's advice for Webmasters and I came across something in Google's philospophy that caught my attention:

Check out number two here: http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html

It's a philosophy that makes sense. My question is, is Google getting away from this with all of their other offerings? Obviously Google's one thing is search - but how do we define search? Is Orkut search? Is Gmail search? There are arguments that all of it has to do with search - but I'm thinking, it's not actually search. The recent acquisition of Urchin by Google shows they are now interested in analytics.

It may be a matter of symantics, but one for the Google folks to ponder in light of what happened in 2002. You can do one thing and do it well, but you better know what one thing is.

iMediaConnection: SearchTHIS: Clutter, Relevancy, & Search