Who is Gada Be using this?

Scoble talks about Chris Pirillo (of Gnomedex/Lockergnome notoriety) and his new Web search mashup – Gada Be. Read Chris’ own blog post announcing it for good insight.

Catchy name, follows the del.icio.us meme of using the domain as the product name. Works, as people (us geeks at least) will remember it and not need to search on it every time. And at least it’s easier to spell right than del.icio.us…

My question for Chris is, who is the intended long-term target market for this tool? The trick for searching from mobile phone (the ideal target device, although you can search from a Widget, Firefox plugin, etc.) is sufficiently “geeky” that I don’t see this getting much uptake among your John Q Public mobile Web user – or even general Web browser. They are still more likely to just pop over to Google mobile, or the default search provided by their service provider.

Which raises another couple points, to in turn help identify the likely user: who really needs search results aggregated from 140+ searches? 99% of what I need on the Web can be found via Google or MSN Search, with perhaps an occasional IceRocket or Technorati foray. I forget the source, but the general wisdom seems to be that the vast majority of Web searchers never venture past the opening page of results. No one cares if Google indexes 600 billion sites, we just care about the quality of the first 10 returned.

If most searches don’t have time or inclination to go beyond page 1 on Google, who’s going to want to browse through the opening page results from 139 other sources?

The other differentiator for Gada Be is the easy generation of OPML for your search results. Given the relatively low adoption rate (debatable point of course) and awareness of RSS among the general public, knowledge of OPML I would guess is even way below that. So the audience that appeals to is tiny.

Which really narrows Gada Be’s likely user base to a very specific group – the early adopter types who attend Gnomedex and Web 2.0, who are the heavy bloggers and rabid RSS fans (and I tend to count myself among this group…so no slight intended). It is a tool designed for the folks who would read Pirillo or Scoble’s blog, for instance.

Nothing wrong with that. Niche tools are often signs of the mainstream to come, and even better, occasionally make their creators wealthy. They push the edges and eventually drive innovation back into the heavy hitters (the path RSS is embarking on). All while giving a relative niche group of hard core Web users some sweet new tools to dig around in. But for all the excitement about Gada Be, I’d be suprised to see it “cross the chasm” and break out beyond this niche market.