No matter how sophisticated the technology that drives them, Google and all other traditional search engines suffer from the same fundamental limitation - they only find information for you when you type a query into the interface. In other words, you have to tell them what you want and when you want it. Search agents such as Copernic are making an interesting attempt to overturn this paradigm and bring greater efficiency to the searching process by seeking information on an ongoing basis.
The concept is simple enough: so simple in fact that, like all great ideas, you wonder why nobody thought of it before. Essentially you tell the Copernic agent what you're interested in - let's say new books about architecture. The agent will then scour 90 different search engines, tracking new search results and reporting back to you with sets of summarized, collated results, like your own personal web crawler. It's up to you to pick out what to follow up, but theoretically this could save you hours of scanning the web yourself, seeking out similar data. There is an entire industry dedicated to seeking out media reports on celebrities and corporations that already benefits from technology of this kind. Copernic makes it available to the regular user.
Time never stands still on the web, and this is just as true of search technology as anything else. No company, not even Google, can afford to rest on its laurels in an environment where ever-growing numbers of users must sift through ever-increasing volumes of data to find what they need. The old model of typing arcane search strings into little text boxes probably still has some mileage in it, but the days of this approach are almost certainly numbered.
Whether it's created by Google or someone else, the field is wide open for the next killer search application. The search industry appears set to undergo a fragmentation, with a range of specialized engines and new technologies providing capabilities that suit the many ways in which different people look for information, and the wide variety of information they are seeking. This fragmentation could bring with it an erosion of Google's natural core audience as they disperse among a variety of new players.
It's equally possible, of course, that a single visionary company could supplant Google's position, rapidly becoming very popular and having to face in turn the same issues that Google is struggling to deal with now. Whatever the future holds, one thing is certain: the way you search for information online is once again set to change.
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