Bit-Torrent meets Jeeves

June 1st, 2005

EVER CATCH ONE OF THOSE “butterfly effect” moments well before the seemingly insignificant event triggers a Web of interconnected, unpredictable results? The Ask Jeeves agreement with BitTorrent could be one of those moments, signifying a change where “education” and “transparency” evolve from buzzwords to differentiators.
You’re familiar with Ask Jeeves, the top-five search engine that Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp agreed to acquire. BitTorrent isn’t yet a household word, but it’s well on its way in following on the heels of Napster and Kazaa, both in terms of utility and notoriety. BitTorrent is the name of a file-sharing protocol, a five-person company behind it, and now a search engine.
As I write this, there are 48 articles referencing BitTorrent on Wired.com, compared with seven at NYTimes.com and MediaPost, and five at WSJ.com. According to Intelliseek’s BlogPulse Trend Search, over the past two months, references to BitTorrent appeared on between .01 and .03 percent of all blog posts. At the end of May, it spiked to between .07 and .08 percent. In short, the geeks and bloggers are taking notice, but the business press is just starting to catch on.

Yes geek technology being applied to a mainstream commercial context. Because search matters and search will start to increasingly be important when we search in earnest for content, information etc., that is uniquely important to us.

We won’t be waiting for the mailer, the magazine, we will be online hunting down what we want to know.

There will be many factors driving the growth of search over the next several years, including local, international, multimedia, and personalized search.

Via Mediapost

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