Thursday, May 24, 2007 6:32 AM
So, being a fan of the NBC show The Office, I was bouncing around the web the other night looking for a Dwight Schrute bobblehead or something (actually a video clip highlight from a past episode). I started with a Google search and noticed that in the list of results was a video clip of one of the actors on the David Letterman show.
Here's the thing...I watched the video without ever leaving the search results page (I took a picture of what I saw as I watched the video).
There was no click-through. That is, I did not click-through the '"hit" on the results page to view the video; I just watched it on Google results page itself. The page didn't even reload. The video simply appeared when I clicked a little plus (+) symbol and then I clicked once more to start it playing. In effect, the search results became "sticky," which is a more a goal I see associated with portal websites. I realize this is just one example, but...
Is this the future? Looking at the legal slice of the world, will lawyers someday submit their multimedia content to sites like YouTube and similar such that it can be found and consumed right from a Google search page? No doubt some lawyers will raise intellectual property issues and cry foul. Yet, Google has a huge audience (55% of all search traffic by the last report I saw), and is hard to ignore. Especially for lawyers using multimedia for marketing purposes, intellectual property concerns may take a backseat when they consider how much smaller their potential audience will be if they don't embrace Google. Moreover, I don't doubt that Google will ultimately have revenue-sharing models in place to help ease such concerns.
Looking long-term, I am now wondering if Search itself will be the Portal? Instead of a portal with search features, might not a search with portal features be the dominate web traffic model?
Many of us have long thought of Google (and other search engines) as a portal perhaps, but more as a portal we visit briefly on the way to some other website. But, is that the model of the future?
What if we search, but never leave?
Something to chew on, that is for sure...