I remember the day I first found the search. A friend had told me about this website called AltaVista and I figured I’d check it out. I typed in a few words. At this point, I can’t remember what I was searching for, but knowing me, it probably had to do with travel and I seem to recall being in my parents’ basement. Anyway, I typed and, next thing I knew, the computer spit answers back at me. I was hooked!

Granted, back in those days, searching wasn’t always a flawless process, nor is it that way now. But it did open a whole new world of the Web. I no longer had to guess a company’s website and go directly to it. I could search around, looking for the company and maybe even others like it.

In my searching progression, I moved next to Yahoo. I used Yahoo for my email service, so it was a natural progression. I got everything I needed all in one place.

Of course, I flirted with other sites like Ask Jeeves, but I kept coming back. I liked the results I was getting and the simplicity.

But one day, someone mentioned this site called Google and the world changed forever. I dumped Yahoo as fast as I could and became a Google devotee. Why? The stark design appealed to me. I wasn’t bombarded by news, music, and gossip when just trying to do my search. Search was truly what I wanted and Google gave it to me. Plus, the results of the Google search were unmatched.

I did step away for awhile, trying to do a good deed by searching on Goodsearch, but I couldn’t break my Google habit. It had gotten under my skin and I had to have it.

But it wasn’t until I read “The Search,” by John Battelle that I realized how much Google truly had taken over the digital world. Yes, I knew of Google maps, Google news, and Google Images. I even followed the company’s foray into putting books online and making them searchable, but the company’s history, acquisitions and offerings were nothing I really I knew. Finally, I understood why Google is such a force in the online world. And why I should’ve found a way to get my hands on some of that Google stock early.

Despite all this, have we gotten to the perfect search? Not yet. I still do searches that don’t give me the results I what or make me go to the second or third or fourth page of my results to get at it.

But we have come a long way. We have, as Battelle calls it, the “database of intentions”–all of the world’s hopes, desires, wants, and needs–within servers somewhere, ready to meet our future needs. This idea of the database is really our best hope for moving toward an intelligent search that senses what we want and need as soon as we type in the words. I actually look forward to that day in the future when I can type in my request and find that one perfect result waiting for me to follow it… out into the World Wide Web.