Scoble Search
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Scoble wrote late last week that Mahlo, Techmeme and Facebook is going to kick googles butt which is funnily just what I was saying back in April when I wrote the Death of Google Search
Here are few quotes of what I wrote back then,
The increase in popularity of social sites has spread into the search results business. Things like stumbleupon, del.icio.us and others are showing that people can find what they are looking for outside the standard single form entry field search system that Google makes so much of its money from.
And,
If there is one large corporate that is capable of this kind of innovation it is Google but in comparison to the million upon millions of innovators out there right now trying new ways to interactive with the internet I would put a wager on it being another two man team who makes the next step.
When I wrote that article (apart from getting flamed for it!) I was only a couple of months into writing the blog and getting experience within the blogosphere/social networking arena so still had quite a limited view. My original opinion on the techniques that Google were using was that the results seemed to be getting further twisted by all the linking going on within the blogosphere.
What has changed in those intervening months is that Google seems to be working harder on getting accuracy / frequency of update right within sites that are ‘hot news’. Is this the result of better algorithms? I very much doubt it. The more obvious conclusion is that Google is throwing more ‘people power’ behind the search engine to fix what is quickly becoming inaccurate / irrelevant.
So Scoble is right? Yes and No, I think the current darlings of the valley Mahalo, Techmeme are very accurate within their very specialized fields (or demographics) but to those outside our little blogosphere/social networking area (which probably equates to 98% of the internet users) it means nothing. Google IS the internet to my Mum, if I tell her a URL to type in she types it into Google (strange but true). Is she going to seek out some specialist site for her interests that is going to give her more relevant results? No.
I said in my original post that Google was not likely to be the creator of the new technologies that make the next ‘big shift‘ in search (and this is now coming true) yet Google is in place to be the company large enough (and fast enough as a corporate) to start incorporating all these specialized social based ranking results back into its overall search results.
I don’t believe one single social site is going to be dominant enough to give us a wide enough demographic for global search results (would you want the DIGG crowd voting on the best gardening tips?) but I could see some form of super aggregator that takes the results from everywhere and puts into into one simple Google like search interface. Who is best place to achieve make this a reality? Google.
Comment by Meraj Khattak on 27 August 2007:
Right, Google or any other main stream search will remain a necessity for the other 98% of people on the net.
However, when Facebook, Mahalo, Technorati and other social networking related product comes out and it succeeds, it shows that there is more to come in the search arena. As most of the products are related to information sharing / access / communication, we might even see some thing better than Google or them.