Apple Hires Amazon Search Exec to Run Siri

That's a very interesting article. I wonder whether search, in general (as measured by traffic on the major search engines) is declining, or whether people are using more specialized search websites/apps (this was kind of touched up in the article).

For example, when i have programming questions, my first place to look is StackOverflow as opposed to Google. or for restaurants I look at Yelp or Urbanspoon.

In other words, is search traffic just becoming more fragmented across different sites (Yelp, Amazon, StackOverflow, etc.) and apps?

That's a pretty silly article, extrapolating from the already over-extrapolated musings of an analyst. It's asserting that "peak search" occurred last month (no time to wait! must be first to report!), based on a single number from a single analytics firm that says that search numbers declined year over year. The analyst leaves it at that, but the blogger has to take it further.

Also amusing: "Why The Google Era May Be Over"..."Google is not as bad off as it might seem".

In any case, if you look closer, you then see that the peak growth rate of searches in the last two years was only six months prior, and you start to realize why reporting on graphs looking through a one month window is stupid.

Personally, I would think that many people peaked in personal search years ago (there's only so many you can do in a day). What we're seeing is probably largely driven by population growth and expanding internet access.