How difficult is it to change?

Recently, Luis (General Manager of Bioalma) sent me the TV ad for the new search engine Searchme.com. For those who don’t know it yet, Searchme is a visual search engine that allows you to see the website that you are about to visit. Obviously, the ad is the perfect illustration of what Searchme is able to do for you and what changes it represents. I think it is really interesting and it brings up an exciting discussion. How difficult is it to change our processes? And how often do we change the way we do things?.

Changing is difficult. Just think of the last time you changed your favorite coffee brand you have every morning. When was that? Or the tools and programs you’re used to use on your computer. When was it? And what about your search engine. When was it? No need to give an answer now, but I guess it was a long time ago. And I can’t blame you for that, people tend to stick to what they are used to because:

• they are familiar with it
• they have it under control
• they have spent a great deal of time learning to use it at its best
• they were told to use it when they didn’t know much about them
• …

Even if we know that there are better solutions for a certain task we -you, I, everyone- don’t change that easily. The feeling of not having under control what we are doing is something not many people look forward to. Let me put it another way: change in habits is something that take time and can’t be afforded by all of us. How frustrating is it to notice that once you’re used to something, the trend’s already changed? Will you be one of the people who enjoy what they know or one of the people who enjoy what’s to be discovered?

Well, it is a tough question. For instance, how many times, when you are away from home and see an international food chain restaurant, you smile and think, finally somewhere where I know what I’m going to get?

Those are questions that have been studied and discussed more than once. Christensen CM and Raynor ME, in their book The Innovator’s Solution: creating and sustaining successful growth talk about how difficult it is for products to be successful if they request from the user to change processes. Seth Godin, in his book Purple Cow, puts emphasis on the early adopters and show how they can help one firm, one product, one idea or service spread on the market or not.

Searchme.com is a new visual search engine for the web. Unlike others, the results consist of a web site’s screenshot presented in the coverflow manner. This is a great innovation in visualization as the screenshot loads fast and allows you to skip from one to another in no time.

Antonio Ortiz, a Spanish technology blogger sustains that one of the ways of competing in the search engine landscape is by differentiation in visualization. However is not the only one.

Like Searchme there are many others search engine competing offering new visualization results. (For more information, you can read this comprehensive article on Visual Search Engines)

In the biomedical sector there are several  alternative search engine out there too. Few are based on technology to compete others in visualization and some they embraced semantic technologies to find more relevant results and make the search research process faster and less painful.

Since changing is difficult, do you think that people would change their favorite biomedical search engine for another? To what extent? And you, what would you do?

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