FINDING BILL'S ANSWER by Jay Bailey, Answers.com

There's an audio clip we use in many of our PowerPoint presentations at Answers.com.  It's from an April 2005 interview that Bill Gates gave to National Public Radio's Morning Edition.  Here's what Mr. Gates said: 

"We're going to look back on what search is today and laugh at how inconvenient it was to go click on a bunch of links and find funny things there, because we'll be bringing the answer back, directly to the user."

As you might guess, I enjoy using this snippet in explaining our product:  As a content site, Answers.com offers actual "answers" on about four million subjects, as opposed to lists of links to follow one by one (what I like to call, "Click-Back-Click-Back Syndrome").

Yes, I've nodded and smiled smugly as I've listened to this clip a hundred times.  But only recently did it dawn on me:  I think that Bill was just plain wrong.  

Here's why:  Search engines index the web. They discover and appraise the most incredible tidbits in places you'd never otherwise know about or manage to explore.  Their crawlers and spiders may dig up a statement from a college thesis, a TV show transcript, an obscure blog, a small-town online newspaper, or an FAW on a corporate site. Typing in bizarre strings of words often finds this stuff, and let's face it: a lot of our searches are pretty creative.  Often, they are fairly unique.  In those cases, the results you want should be an interesting compiled list of pages for you to explore. 

But that's not giving you an answer.  Because often, there isn't one.  It's giving you raw material.  Fodder.  Destinations to explore.  The assumption is that you'll pick through it all and use your investigating skills to draw a conclusion that makes sense to you (which can be a challenge when you come across contradictory assertions.)  I'm not criticizing this approach; it's useful, innovative stuff that's efficient in many cases.  Google, after all, is Google.

So when people assume that Answers.com is a search engine, I have to correct them.  We don't do the indexing thing.  We provide Bill's "answer" by pulling a topic from a massive collection (180 different sources on 4 million topics) of licensed content.  We call it the "Encyclo-diction-almanac-apedia" approach.  We have entries about everything from derivatives to Edgar Allen Poe to Lithuania to nuclear power to Jerk Chicken.  We pay publishers to use their content, then post contextual ads on the front page to foot the bill.  There's no "indexing the web" involved, and this, we believe, yields a more reliable process that is appropriate when you need the who-what/when facts.  We're there for you when you'd prefer a single, reliable source over a mix of pages you have to assess on your own. 

But her's one thing:  Aggregating content like this is not necessarily something that Bill Gates is looking to do.  It's not search.  The search engines' model is to index millions of pages; contextual ads along these results serve everyone: the user, the advertiser, and the search engine.  On the other end of the spectrum is a model wherein a content site uses technology to connect you to one of its useful pages - one with an answer - and then monetizes it with ads (or a subscription fee.)

So there's search and there's content.  And the latter actuall fuels the former.  

But Bill's hypothetical model is a kind of Frankenstein's monster.  I read in his vision the goal of providing a single answer.  But from where?  What site should a search engine be choosing for that answer, and how can it ethically lift the content to use without payment or partnership?  Asking for the calorie count of a donut is simple, as is finding the name of the 27th President of the United States.  But what about whey you're looking for something less straightforward?  Here's the real question, Bill:  Once we start "bringing the answers back, directly to the user," what happens with all the other opinions, definitions or perspectivs that search offers?  Is pointing often to Wikipedia the answer? 

The way I see it, there will always be a dichotomy.  Search engines will always send visitors over to websites, where the site owners can teach, sell, share, rant and offer.  Their content belongs to them, and the search engine serves as a switchboard.  The added value is the development of tools to help refine or disambiguate the query, with the user's help, to direct him more effectively.  At the end of the day, the "answer" may be found in the process of exploring these sites.  On the other side, content sites like Answers.com, About.com, WebMD, or CNN will offer various technologies, methodologies, and business models for sharing their assets...whether driven by traffic, search engines, or business relationships.  They/We are the ones offering "the answer." 

When it comes to providing a single, helpful answer, though, it's a business unlike any other.  An "Answer Engine" is not the next step in a search engine's evolution.  It's a different animal.  Bill's vision of a search engine actually proving "the" authoritative answer simply doesn't compute.