Behind an Illusion of Technical Innovation Lies a Mind Numbing Sameness.

A couple weeks ago Ask Jeeves' mascot got a change of clothes and they added a few bells and whistles. A brief amount of chatter then AJ returned to it's usual anonymity.

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The LATimes announced a service that allows consumers to shop online (what a concept). It was nothing new, just a subdomain of shoplocal.com.

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Later that day I went to MySearchYahoo to try out their beta myYahoo Search. They had a cool MyYahoo Search button to install but I couldn't get it to work. It asked me to drag it into my Links toolbar, like a Favelet, which I did. But it didn't work.

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Then my eyes glazed over reading an eWeek interview with Rick Rashid, senior vice president for research for Microsoft. He talks about the personalization of search, seemingly bluffs his way through a question about realtime blog search, and well... it was... not that exciting.

It was not exciting for the same reasons the other search engine news weren't exciting: A follow the leader mentality has set in.

Even worse, the so-called innovations are awkward and rushed out too fast. Google's book search is a good case. A book publisher who signed up earlier this year told me that Google is behind schedule indexing books. Another fiasco was Amazon's A9 search engine that returned obscene images for ordinary searches.

The innovation will be where it all began: in Search. And once again Google will lead the way. The big question is whether or not it will be clumsy like last years Florida update, or if this time Google will go for the elegant solution.

Webmasters are waiting for the shoe to drop.