Think about the evolution of the net. First it was a problem of too less. It was just a project by the US Dept of Defense, never meant for wide-spread use. But the work kick-started development on the very first Internet protocols, and rapidly evolved into a set of well connected hubs and the first interweb. HTML happened, and Geocities (RIP) became big, and suddenly, everyone everywhere was making web-pages, Frontpage and Dreamweaver were mainstream softwares, (not to mention, NIIT, Aptech and SSI were making quick bushel-loads of money on coding lessons everywhere in India). Then Java, ASP, PHP, Flash, and things got a bit crazy. The net hit its first billion, then the next, and then we stopped counting (at least I did).

Now the problem is of too much. Of glut of information about everything. EVERYTHING. Think of any topic that might interest you and Google never delivers less than tens of thousands of results. (In fact there is a game that challenges users to come up with any two-word combination that delivers only one Google result). Add to that the blog explosion, zillions of user-generated pages being added on social networks (billions of pages, millions of photos, hundreds of thousands of videos, and trillions of messages). The scale is mind-blowing; so much so that the extent of data produced, consumed, shared and stored every single day surpasses years and years of data that was available to the entire world’s population a few years ago.

Google is the index page to this madness. It is a neat table of contents, ordered by its own algorithm into its own priority list. But it is still overwhelming, and the importance of a page is driven by links that flow in and out of that page (hence the old name Backrub. If you are more interested about how it works, I strongly recommend the original thesis. Very technical, but makes a nice read). Google is trying a social angle to its main search, but is still driven by algorithms and its database than by humans (quite understandably so, given the size of the frickin’ internet). Indexing, crawling, archiving, mining and ordering make the search results relevant, but not necessarily ideal in usability.

For example, say I am searching for the best magazine styled Wordpress themes (as I was, the other day); Google gives me a list of sites that rank high amongst people who visited it and linked to it. But a human would have told me sites that have similar themes, other plugins that I might find useful with the theme, pros and cons of the 10 top listings, links to forums that have troubleshooting help for these themes, cost comparisons for purchase etc. The opportunity for adding value is immense, and there seems to be no one doing the job.

The next billionaire will be the guy who makes search contextual and human. Like a Wikipedia for search. Where the net is broken down by topic, and each topic has the best resources, links, documents, videos, papers, facts, at one single place. And is constantly updated. By you and me. Squidoo is a start, but is still limited to having one author / editor per lens. Knol is an attempt by Google, but the current level of content and coverage, well, sucks. And my guess is lot of the giants want to get their hands into this, but none of them know exactly how. Time will soon tell.

Google made the index page to the internet. Someone has to write a good table of contents with all parts of the same chapter put together. That is when the user experience will deliver an incremental benefit to create the next billion $. Let’s wait and watch.