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How Social Networks May Kill Search as We Know It
mattnyc99 writes "Recently we discussed a startup that's blending social networking with traditional Web search. But now high geek Glenn Derene takes it one step further, pronouncing that our increasingly traceable online footprints will transform Google's dominant algorithm and open up the world of Web search for the 21st century. Speaking to a tuned-in VC guy and scoring a rare interview with Google's VP of search, Derene may have some meat behind his newly-coined term: 'faceboogle.' From the article: 'As we each carve out our individual niche on the Web, the logic of search may well flip inside out. Since we are essentially meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships, shopping habits and surfing addictions, it's conceivable that the information could attempt to find us — the old concept of push media, but in a far more refined way.'"
The use of "social networking" data for search has been discussed before in the search technology community, where it's not well thought of. "Inertia" in search, where your search history affects your later results, turns out to be a pain. Search becomes nonrepeatable, both for the individual and for others. This adds more hassle than the gain provided by "inertia".
Reading both the article and the interview with the Google VP, it's clear that the article exaggerates Google's interest in this area.
Social networking data is taken seriously on the advertising side, where using social networking data for ad selection is already being done by Myspace and their ilk. Amazon and Netflix already have rather good systems for deciding what to recommend to their customers. That's where this really works, where the seller has a big product selection and the user is already prepped to buy something. Myspace isn't doing as well, but then, as we've pointed out before, their advertisers are mostly bottom feeders. Ad rates on Myspace are very low, and it shows.
A key question is who controls the use of the social networking data for ad selection. Not the user, of course; the disagreement is between the social networking sites and the search engines. Look for a battle in that area, perhaps followed by mergers.
Anybody else remember the creative term "Veronica" search
Yep, guess that makes you old. Veronica is obviously a "backronym" (the phrase behind it was invented to afterwards to match the word). There is the WWW now, which essentially replaced Gopher space, but before that the 'net was all about FTP. To seach public FTP archives you used "Archive Search", which was contracted to the nickname "Archie". Then Gopher came out which added structure to the big pile of archives, and a Gopher search was made for it. Since it was a search utility "companion" to Archie it was named Veronica (as in the comic book characters).
Later a localhost-only, optimised search utility for a Gopher host was made called....Jughead (because it was the "lazy friend" of Archie and Veronica).
This article reminds me of theories about the 'net eventually becoming sentient...with this big trail of info crumbs we might find our friends Archie, Veronica and Jughead will turn into stalkers...
If you have firefox or opera, you can add wikipedia as a search engine.
In opera I believe it is enabled by default. Typing "w [searchterm]" will load that page result, usually the direct wikipedia page.
In firefox 3b5 you can right click on any field and set it to be a search engine. Just go to wikipedia.org and use that one, or click the icon next to the search bar.
Regardless it's hard to beat f6 w searchterm for speed.
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.