My Dream Team of Search Part I
This post begins a trilogy that I will write on the subject of a “Dream Team” of Search.
The story begins with a post by Gord Hotchkiss in Search Engine Land’s Just Behave column entitled, “Search In The Year 2010.” In that post, Mr. Hotchkiss writes,
“If ever I had to build a search engine, or more precisely, the interface of a search engine, this would be the team I would want to bring together.”
He then goes on to list his eight Dream Team members. Not surprisingly, his list includes a Google VP, a Yahoo! VP, a manager from Microsoft Live Search, and one from Ask, plus Danny Sullivan and a few others.
This Dream Team post caught the eye of VortexDNA blogger Kaila Colbin, who set about putting together an “alternative” dream team of her own. I have applied to be included on her team, and I am waiting with my fingers crossed. If she accepts me, I hope to publish it here as Part III.
Part II will come out tomorrow, Monday, September 3rd. It will introduce my Dream Team of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, September 2007. I have spent many months and countless hours refining this list (mostly from readers’ suggestions), so that now it contains the best of the best. 100 search related sites out of our Global total of well over 1,000 search engines.
But that’s tomorrow. Today I just want to mention another Dream Team that means very much to me. It is the team of American writers known as the Algonquin Round Table. If you are not American, you may not be familiar with them, but that’s fine, AltSearchEngines is nothing if not a place to see new things; or old things from a new perspective. If you are American, you still may not be familiar with this team, but let me summarize their history (thanks to Answers.com).
The Algonquin Round Table was a group of New York City writers, critics, actors and wits that met from 1919 until about 1929, though its legacy endured long afterward.
They met for lunch every day at a round table at the Algonquin Hotel and traded quips; many of these sayings are still repeated today. The group began meeting in June 1919 when several of its members returned from World War I where they met on the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. There was no formal membership, so people came and went, but the primary members included:
Robert Benchley, humorist and actor
Marc Connelly, playwright
George S. Kaufman, playwright and director
Harpo Marx, actor, comedian, and musician
Dorothy Parker , critic, poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter
Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor
Robert Sherwood, author and playwright
Alexander Woollcott, critic and journalist
Others from the theatre and publishing world visited. Since some of the members were popular newspaper columnists who repeated some of the conversations in their columns, the quips got wide circulation. Members often visited Neshobe, a private island owned by Alexander Woollcott, located on eight acres in the middle of Lake Bomoseen in Vermont.
The Algonquin Hotel leaves their table set with name-cards of the famous people who sat there. There is also a painting depicting the Round Table, painted by Natalie Ascencios, that hangs in the hotel dining room. A film about the members, The Ten-Year Lunch (1987), won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. A 1995 movie about the group was entitled Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.
My wife and I have been to the Algonquin Hotel to see the famous Round Table, and I have been to Neshobe Island; my mother has a summer house on Lake Bomoseen so I grew up spending every summer up there in Vermont.
What I want to emphasize in this post is the unique dynamic of this dream team of writers. These gifted people first of all admired the work of the others, and then found themselves growing fond of each other. They became life-long friends. It was, “a goodly fellowship of well-known people,” according to Marc Connelly, the last surviving member.
They also quoted each other freely in each others, works, as you may have noticed that Kaila, Nitin, and I often do. Another Round Tabler said, “it was the time of my life; those were my laughing years.” Alex Woolcott became the group’s ringleader, and even though they bought that island as a group, he eventually bought them out and spent most of his later years there (the little stone house in the photo).
It was at this time that Harold Ross launched The New Yorker magazine, and that you’ve probably heard of. But few people know that at first these friends of Ross’ freely submitted their work to help him out, and one friend in particular kept him in business through many tough times, until eventually The New Yorker became a huge success.
What a picture! Since AltSearchEngines began June 1st, we have had dozens of Guest Articles, CEO Views, Great Debates, Global search engines, and much more, not to mention the initial List Masters. None of these contributors has ever been paid a cent. They contribute because they believe in the Cause; the notion that Alternative Search Engines are wonderful creations, and that more people need to see them to appreciate them.
As for the courageous backer of the fledgling New Yorker magazine, who but Richard MacManus can be credited with publishing the first Top 100 list, dreaming up the AltSearchEngines blog, and guiding it through its initial growing pains?
The parallels between that historic dream team of American writers that inspires me and my current dream team that motivates and sustains me are clear and “shiny.”
So let Gord have his VPs, and as much as I admire Jakob Nielsen and Danny Sullivan, and I sincerely do, I’ll stick with my dream team, thank you very much!
What about you, who’s on your dream team of search related thinkers?
If you work for a search engine, use the comments section to brag about your team!
September 7th, 2007 at 10:43 am
[...] This post concludes a trilogy that I wrote on the subject of a Dream Team of Search. [...]