The very first time I used the Google search engine on the Web, in the year 2000, I was hooked. The other search engines and directories that I used to frequent earlier were soon cobwebbed in a forgotten corner of my mind; AltaVista, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo, AskJeeves, LookSmart—the entire lot. Google's technology makes eminent sense for most routine searches, ensuring you get credible and relevant sites at the top of the results, through its PageRank methodology, which calculates the value of a page by the number and importance of the links being made to it from other sites. The engine's cool interface, its great results and practical advanced search options quickly convert the first-timer into a loyal and contented Googler.

Then I chanced upon an article in Time by Anita Hamilton last month. She too wrote of her love affair with Google—satisfying, but rapidly descending into predictable and even boring. Although Google continues to innovate, and has been inducted by several other major directories and engines, it can only go so far with its core search philosophy. Anita wanted new thrills, and she found them to differing degrees at Alltheweb.com, Kartoo.com and Teoma.com.

I decided to take a dekko, and was immediately floored by AlltheWeb. Claiming to be the largest indexer of the Web and one of the most frequently updated, the search results sure do seem to be more delectable, especially for obscure stuff. Lesson learned: Even as a savvy Web user it's easy to fall into a complacent groove, in the mistaken notion that you're getting the best out of a Web that's actually leapt way forward to new levels of delight. And to think that I was the one who used to frequently advocate the use of more than one search engine!

I kept on with the research for better search. Turns out that there are a bazillion different engines out there, each with its own unique innovation providing specific functionality for every conceivable variant requirement. Want semantic clustering? Go to Vivisimo or Teoma or WebBrain. Here's where the results will be segregated by theme; for instance search for "scorpions" and you'll get clustered results that keep the poisonous arthropod away from the famed German hard rock band and its fans. Want to really drill down and hone in to that needle in the haystack? The advanced search parameters of AltaVista and HotBot will get you there every time. And if you want a mega-list of specialised, topic-wise search facilities there's no better place to start than at allsearchengines.com.

Yes, Google's great, but there's so much of alternative innovation out there too, it's simply astonishing. All too frequently, we stick with the tried and tested and as a result miss out on what could have been.

In fact, this premise could well be applied to the Indian computer industry as well. Fact is, we lack innovative thinking. Nasscom often says that there should be something to distinguish our leading software services companies from each other and from the crowd. But can there really be any such distinction when all follow more or less the same model? Quality certification ceased to be a distinguishing feature once almost everyone obtained it. One gets the feeling that we're flogging the low-end services horse beyond reason, at the expense of just about every other lucrative avenue.

At the Nasscom Gartner Summit 2002, Bob Hayward, Gartner's senior vice president for APAC, observed that there wasn't room for even a 100 similar Indian IT services companies, let alone a thousand. Thirty or so is what his estimate of appropriateness was, BPO bandwagon included. And for the rest? The intellectual property and product route is the only way to go. There are so many exciting emerging areas in information technology today, but the India name is conspicuously absent from leading-edge research in any of them. Things like biometrics, grid computing, autonomic computing, quantum computing, nano-computing, fuel cell technology, speech recognition and photon science, for instance. Sadly, our inability to look beyond the short-term has doomed us to an existence of following the leaders and gathering up the crumbs, in just about every field one can think of.

I'm proud and pleased that IT services has taken us so far (and will continue to bring us glory), but the time has come to look far beyond. As part of a publication that's grown along with the Indian computer industry, we at Express Computer will do all we can to recognise and publicise innovation wherever we see it. There are a few companies out there that have stuck their necks out and are daring to think different. We're going to stick our necks out too and back them to the hilt through these pages. The search for innovation has begun, and it's not going to be only on Google!

- Val Souza, Editor
valsouza@expresscomputeronline.com