Jun 28, 200610:24 AMThe Life

Google too busy for the search biz?

Yesterday, I wanted some collated search analysis on several subjects of interest to The Desert Quidnunc's readers, so after comparing Google's Zeitgeist (updated June 19: WAY out of date) to Ask's Top Searches (updated June 23: also out of date) to MetaSpy (updated instantly, but no real trend analysis), to the Yahoo Buzz (updated every morning: bingo), I wrote to Google: "FYI, it looks like Yahoo is providing more search info than Google. Do you update [Zeitgeist] more than every 8 or 9 days?"

Karen Wickre, their Senior Editor of Corporate Communications replied, in part: "We too admire what Yahoo's done with the Buzz Index. It's possible that Yahoo has more resources than we do for this particular task, in which case I congratulate them."

Hm. It looks like Google is too busy with other things, to remain competitive in the search-engine business. Karen went on to write: "Our weekly Zeitgeist, which you've pointed to in your note, is actually updated once every 7 days by a human."

I just checked, and it's still showing the June 19 date. I hope nothing has happened to that poor human. Maybe Google is not aware that information like this can be easily collated and updated by some newfangled machines.

I think we should take up a collection, and buy those poor Google folks a computer.