Ever been on Google Website for Searching something? Have you noticed how 1998ish it looks? Ever wondered why you have to type complicated terms with hyphens in a form field as if there was no 21st century? Are you one of the many who thinks that Google has grown a monopoly that needs some serious competitors?

I think the time has come for some new steps in search engine developments. If you can't improve the database and it's indexes anymore, you always can improve the communication between humans and machines. And when it comes to searching, we are 10 years behind, due to lack of competition.

My vision of a new search engine looks like this. On the start screen you see a tag cloud of the most important web content genre names, as well as the newest keywords in the news. All main keywords are spatially organized by dimensional analysis. By scrolling around and zooming in and out, you can explore less popular areas of the field. The tag cloud is in constant change, because new items grow out of nowhere when something new happens, and old topics shrink and disappear, when noone uses them. The more people search for something, the bigger it is. You can drag and drop any keyword and combinations onto the search field. When you click on a tagword, a new tag cloud opens up with the keyword in the center. But this time, the keywords have undergone a cluster analysis, thus simulating a semantic categorization. So the tag cloud is spatially grouped into clusters.

Search results aren't a list anymore. Noone likes these lists. Rather it is a new tag cloud, this time it is showing URLs of the top level domains. The more search results in a domain, the bigger it is. The URLs are also grouped by cluster analysis. By scrolling and zooming, you can navigate through large fields of results. This also would reduce SEO and Sub Level Domain Spamming a lot.

Similar concepts could be introduced for Image results, where not only keywords but also color, size, etc. could by taken into cluster analysis. News items could have timelines, geographical locations as hierarchies. I think it would be pretty easy to improve search engines, many bigger websites have amazing local solutions, so why doesn't Google crank it up a notch?

picture by Matt McGee