Believe it or not, according to a latest study, 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
The birth of search engines is the foundation of the mass adoption of internet technology. Let’s look back at life before search engines even existed. You had to know the exact URL to enter a website. Then, you needed to move step-by-step through the hierarchical navigation structure and finally arrived where you wanted to go. For example, if you wanted to reach out to Adot for collaboration and could not remember its domain name www.a.site, you had to start from an information aggregator, clicked startups, then Web3, then infrastructure, then went to Adot’s website, and looked for where the contact information was located in Adot’s web pages. If you could not find Adot under infrastructure, you might need to see whether Adot was listed under Others, for example.
However, the existence of search engines changes everything. Search engines lower the barrier for users to access the internet sharply. With search engines, users can simply input Adot and related information will pop up directly. Sometimes you might need to add extra keywords to increase the accuracy, but still, search engines have changed how people find information radically. Previously, you had to have some basic ideas about Adot to make sure you can find its contact information in the right place, and now, you only need to know the name of Adot, then Adot will come to you. Things have become much easier.
OK. We have discussed how search engines benefited users. What is the impact of search engines on developers? Do search engines also benefit developers? The answer is a big yes. As mentioned, in the pre-search-engines era, users needed to know the exact domain name to enter a website to do further research. People are usually so lazy that they are only able and willing to memorize limited domains. It is human nature. Thus, at that time, the web traffic was held tightly by giant developers. Even though a small player launched a web that could fulfill a specific user need perfectly, it was still hard for people to find the product — because people did not know the domain. However, with search engines, even people do not know the product name at all, as long as they know what kind of things they are looking for. For instance, they just need to know they want to review Web3 search engines in the market, and then, Adot might be listed here in the search result and people will find it much more easily. Thus, search engines create a relatively fair market for developers to some extent and enable more developers to survive in the industry. Certainly, this is a good thing for users as well. We all have learned from Econ 101 that a monopoly hurts the market and consumers in multiple ways — the monopolist has no check on its power to raise prices or lower the quality of its product or service. The more players are in the market, the more diverse options consumers can have.
Besides users and developers, search engines are also benefiting the whole industry regarding “openness”. With search engines and hyperlinks, users can directly access any web page and jump between different websites. If a developer wants to survive on the internet, he/she needs to keep his/her website open to search engines and connect to web pages produced by other developers. Previously, users were controlled within one information aggregator, but now, the whole internet is their playground.
In summary, search engines create the foundation of the current internet that we are familiar with. You might feel confused, “Wait a minute. Everything you said makes sense, but I do not think this is how I feel about search engines. Google is a search engine, right? But it is not ‘open’ at all! The traffic is still going to those giants. What’s wrong here?”
I agree with you. Trust me, I do agree with you. That’s why I am here to write those words and hoping to explore a solution with you together. We still 100% believe in the value of search engines, but we know deeply today’s search engines are outdated and have to be revolutionized.
Starting today, Adot is going to launch a series of blogs to talk about why traditional search engines have reached a bottleneck, why Web3 could empower the development of search engines to the next level, and how Adot is planning to participate in the wave of the whole revolution to provide a new search engine designed for the new era.
If you are interested in what we are going to do, please follow us at @Adot_web3 on Twitter and look forward to our future blogs.