Google makes it easy to search the Internet for data. Not only is Google a household word, but as a result of its extraordinary information access and presentation, for many people the term “Search” now connotes ideas specific to digital information systems like the Internet.
Google (and its competitors) are actually responsible for creating new careers. SEO, literally Search Engine Optimization, was born from a blend of marketing and web development tasks that seek to affect the position of a company’s website in the output (search results) of a search operation.
Search is no easy thing, but Google has steadily improved it. Most recently (within the last few years), they’ve begun to remove the barriers between data types and now “blend” text, video and documents results so that all are accessible within the output of a single search. (This barrier-removal technique is known as blended search, and the output as SERPS, or Search Engine Result Pages.)
Google (and blended search) is so effective that many users have stopped thinking about the web as discrete documents stored on remote computers. Now the Internet is a cloud of information from which answers to our questions are manifested.
Still, If you happen to want a specific resource type, you can search for web content, images, video, and others.
But thinking about SEO led me to a question. Aren’t websites (distinguished by root domains) a resource category we might want to search, and isn’t there a better way to display them than what Google makes available currently?
There are millions and millions of sites on the internet. Some have been around a long time, and some were just started today. Some have a specific business purpose, and some are just blogs of miscellaneous (but possibly useful) topics.
So how come Google doesn’t offer an old-fashioned list of sites based on some search criteria? I want to see a list of all the sites dedicated to a topic. The domains should all be unique. And I want “all” of them. I don’t want to click through 400 pages. I want a thousand domain names presented as anchor tags with no other description, except for maybe some meta data (like date site created, number of links in, and security threat level).
This minimal, linear presentation will make it possible for more new sites to be investigated by searchers (like me) since it is so much easier (and certainly faster) for a human to visually scan.
C’mon Google, please do something like this. While I’m all for a cloud of data, sometimes I really do just want to see the individual participants on the web.
While other services may provide something like this, it would be nice to access this information from Google since it is one of the largest repositories of web content.