Hot Commodity

In response to the recent scramble between Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google, several experts have been examining the future of the online search domain, and in the last few weeks I’ve come across several articles that state that the “Big Three” are actually fighting over the “scraps of the last decade of innovation” when in fact a new movement may change the way people use the Internet to search altogether. Of course, this sounds ridiculous when you look at the success of a company like Google that has developed a very rapid and highly efficient method for handling and making sense of the vastest collection of data we humans have ever compiled. As the Web grows exponentially larger and larger, it would seem that search would become increasingly important as well. If you think about it though, as the Web grows larger and larger it will also become more difficult to search efficiently and meaningfully in a way that will deliver useful search results.

So, with the rise of social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn, and Orkut, the youngest generation of Internet users might find themselves searching via their various social networks instead of a complicated (but still generic) search algorithm. Thus, Delver and several other startups are now attacking the concept of “Social Search”, a more refined version of basic Internet search that helps streamline your results based on the argument (or hope) that people you interact with through various social networks should know you better than a mathematical equation. Even Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering in charge of search quality, has suggested that Google’s search could naturally evolve to embrace the data produced from these sites. “Search has always been about people. It’s about getting people what they need. The art of ranking is one of taking lots of signals and putting them together. Signals from your friends are better, stronger, signals,” he says.

(picture courtesy of PopularMechanics)

 Beyond just the social networks you join, think about the amount of information you voluntarily (sort of) provide to Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and several other popular online vendors. Currently a lot of this information is stored in different places (ie: your browser history, your Facebook or MySpace page, the Netflix or iTunes server, etc) but imagine if this mass of information could be used to influence search results on a regular basis. It is already done on a small scale by several of the applications and websites I’ve mentioned but nobody “owns” social search in general the way Google “owns” search (though it is very conceivable that Google may just evolve to own social search as well).

I think it is only natural that a more informed search “algorithm” evolve but I do see some potential concerns.

• Sometimes I like the “more random” results that Google generates. There have been times when I was looking for a website that I had visited before or that had been recommended by a friend who swore by it and ended up finding something else- something better. If “Social Search” eliminates these from the results (or moves them to the very end) we may find ourselves narrowing the search domain further than we want.
• How would organic versus non organic search work? Would websites/companies that pay to appear first or on the sponsored links tabs be subject to this informed search as well?
• When I’m talking to someone remotely and I want to find something they’ll often tell me key words to search for and then say something like “it’s the 5^th one down.” If search becomes more customized the search result order may differ drastically.
• There will of course be all kinds of privacy and security issues that crop up as this phenomenon emerges. I won’t even get into that here.

Some of these are minor issues that are probably worth enduring for the sake of a very efficient and “custom” social search and others will probably be addressed as the search evolves. I wonder what kind of effect this would have on social networks and vendors such as Amazon, Netflix, etc. and what kind of revenue opportunities may emerge?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Company Zeroes and Heroes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.