Search services develop "channels" to ease user access

More than a few experts have credited the search engine with the taming of the World Wide Web's vast frontier. But with the Web now firmly established as the most important computer development since point and click, the search engines -- and today there are dozens of them -- are grappling with the fact that, well, there are simply too many of them. How can the hapless Web wanderer possibly tell them apart?

Enter the "channel." Over the last few months, several of the largest search services, in an attempt to differentiate themselves, have taken a cue from television to organize their services into programming categories. The most recent to do this is Excite, hitherto known for its painstaking site reviews. Last month, Excite rolled out a new interface that organizes the Web into 14 channels. These include such familiar topics as "arts & education," "lifestyle" and "people & chat."

Excite's new organization is more accurately compared to the sections of a newspaper than to television, and the "channel" label can be confusing. But Excite is hoping the television metaphor will strike a familiar note with advertisers, who would like to target specific demographic groups much like they do on television. If you are new to the Web, or like to cruise its back roads without a specific destination, you will like this new organization. Serious searchers, on the other hand, will probably ignore the channels altogether, rarely getting past the service's opening search screen to drill down. Each channel offers the same one-click access to the Yellow Pages, stock quotes, weather, news groups and several other commonly used functions. The "my channels" category lets you design your own opening search screen. A few weeks ago, Lycos added a similar organization to its service, which it is calling Web Guides. Like Excite, it is now organized into subject categories, 18 of them, including news, sports, money, travel, technology and health. The service even has subject categories devoted to autos, fashion and government. Again, once inside a specific topic, users can access a standard set of features. If this all sounds strangely familiar, it should. Of the major search services, the only one not organizing itself this way is Infoseek, which continues instead to pursue the power searcher rather than the browsing consumer. But Yahoo, the grandfather of consumer search services, has been organized into subject categories for some time. And before it came along, America Online had the same idea, which it proudly displays in its opening screen. Yahoo had long ago adopted a strategy of search sites for specific demographic groups, such as one for women, one focused on finance and another for children, called Yahooligans. The company also has a site for twentysomethings, which it developed in partnership with MTV. But even before that its main site was organized into categories like business, news, travel and science. And that is not all. Alta Vista, the popular search service that has its origins in the research labs of Digital Equipment Corp., is putting a special twist on channels. Rather than organize its opening search interface into categories, it categorizes the results in an effort to refine the search. For example, a search on "Whitewater" turns up a dozen or so categories that the user can decide to include or not include, such as "kayaking," "McDougal," "Gingrich" and "rafting," each with its own list of subcategories. The user simply runs down the list and checks off the ones to be included. For a service long known for its speed and comprehensiveness but not its organization, this is an innovative approach to the problem of information overload. In the race to find a strategy that not only clicks with users but feels comfortable to advertisers, these top search engines appear to have achieved what they had probably hoped to avoid. But despite their effort to differentiate themselves, they are looking a lot alike.

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