Rich Skrenta, he of Topix and Web OS posting fame, is turning feed searches over in his mind. This is a neat conversation, referencing our pals Jeremy, Rafer, and others. In essence, why have all the majors punted on the presentweb – the fresh stuff that’s being discussed *right now* via blogs, feeds, and pings?
He sets up the question: But still it seems odd, that with the biggies supposedly in cutthroat competition for search, that they’ve left the field for Feedster as the best resource for this class of searches. Why?
Then asks a bigger one: Feeds & Blogs: Fad or something big?
He points to usenet as the precursor to the current blogosphere, and notes that many are skeptical of the current “wild eyed enthusiasm” w/r/t same. (He also pokes two well known bloggers in the eye with the links he chooses, but I’ll let him deal with that fight!) He wonders if Google is not just waiting and seeing – will this thing just be another search tab, like usenet became?
His conclusion: nope. Content is king, search is the king’s phonebook (or index…). I certainly agree, but the two are entirely intertwingled. Google et al do well when content does well, otherwise, what is there to index? The big question, however, is whether Google wants to start playing in the content aggregation space – the new model of “search, find, subscribe” that Jeremy discusses. Yahoo has already decided it does (and the buzz is that more is coming…). So has MSN and AOL. But at the end of the day, the tail is far too big on this beast, and no one place can own the conversation.