Google: from search to media. Can others go from media to search?

BBC, that just launched a redesign for world service, provides at the top of its homepage a search box repeating what they have in other sites. It means that it is firstly offering a search experience. In fact, it is hiding the browse menu one click deeper in “explore”.

Audience mix search/browse has always been a topic when trying to find out how users approach to our websites and a conclusion that was typically argued was that less experience users tend to search while more experienced (loyal) users in our websites browse.  But, it may change a lot case by case, site by site.

No matter what’s the user preference in search/browse, building up our user experience through search may guide us to display more relevant information for the user from the beginning reducing the importance (and the cost) of our editing teams to build up main and section homepages.

When we build user experience from search, we recognize that it’s not up to us deciding what we want them to read, and so, we –content providers- may try to give answers to users’ requests. Additionally, this experience is widely recognized and assumed, so we make our content easier to be reached.
By contrast to what happened in other media, in which search was left to a symbolic space, BBC shows an experience that is very easy to recognize, but, major strategic implications my come from a development towards search:
1. Search is a big market with a main player in which online media still did not compete. “Traditional” media can build up qualitatively different search experiences so they, at last, offer a different search product.
2. Media, learning from google experience on how to display contents, may perfectly find a different way to end up in a similar but qualitatively different product. Google tries to clean up but its algorithm its search results while all contents begin in a level playing field. Media could do the opposite, by qualifying contents, spread to a higher contents range while capitalizing (and taking care) of it’s know how and historical trust.
3. Opening up search in a media web may just be an strategic beginning for playing in this field, first with owned contents and gradually adding others..

It may seem sci-fi today, but it is quite likely to be the future of many media (content) enterprises.