Over on the 451 CAOS Theory blog, Matthew Aslett  references the CIO.com’s Executives Online blogathon where respondents indicated that Google was their first choice destination when looking for open source software.  Matt says he was expecting more mention of sites like OLEX.  Take the same survey this time next year, and I'll bet that open source aggregation sites like OLEX will get much more attention.

Why?  Because open source has a very long tail. We know from the success of businesses/products like Amazon and iTunes that when it comes to navigating a long-tail, nothing beats domain-specific filters.  Google is the best in the world at search, but in a generic context, they can't help navigate a long tail like a domain-specific site can.  Google themselves realizes this, which is why they've created several domain-specific search services like Blog Search, Book Search, Scholar, and Google Maps.

If we do our jobs here at OpenLogic, in the future Google searches pertaining to open source projects will lead the searcher to OLEX.  From there the user will find what they are looking for, plus a whol lot more.  As we develop more features to help our users navigate the long-tail of open source, users will start coming straight to OLEX when they are looking for open source; like many of us now go to Amazon when looking for a book, or iTunes when looking for music.