Like, it seems, everyone else interested in technology, society, and business, The New York Times devotes a good deal of attention to Google. Its latest assessment about the search company and its prospects focuses on potential challengers to Google and how they might capture a piece of the market.

The entire article is focused on evaluating the whether Google can accurately be characterized as a business defined by its algorithm, its technical, mechanistic solution; and whether this emphasis opens the door to competitors who are able to adapt more of the “human” element. One search company is paying its employees and users to create results pages which seem to be more fruitful than Google’s.

A hand-built Mahalo search-results page has one conspicuous advantage over Google’s: grouping into subthemes, which make a page of links much easier to scan and to find items of particular interest. For example, Mahalo’s page about Paris Hilton, the site’s top search subject last week, arranges the recommended links into clusters including news, photos, gossip, satire and humor. The use of subject categories also eliminates the need to provide, as Google does, two-line text excerpts from the listed sites to provide clues about the site’s contents.

On the other hand, the article acknowledges that it is not entirely fair to characterize Google only in terms of its algorithm. The company is experimenting with more human results driven pages, and considers itself more of a hybrid of the two extremes.

One thing that is not explicitly considered in the article is the ways that the “machines” are becoming smarter and closer to human thought processes. Frankly, I think that the idea of paying people to edit search result pages and group items based on categories that are intuitive to humans seems amazingly time consuming. I think that the truly innovative research will come in the area of making the machines organize the search results better, more like humans would do.

Still, considering how far Google has come in the past ten years, it boggles the mind to think what the landscape for internet search, information organization and retrieval will look like in another decade.

The complete article from The New York Times: “The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip”