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Former Google Exec: Traditional Search Market Shrinking
An anonymous reader writes "Former Google executive Stafford Masie believes that traditional search is dying because users are choosing to query their friends and followers on services like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Here's the quote from the video: 'The pie of search query volumes in the world – that business is shrinking. Why? Because people are going and doing search queries – search query volumes are moving towards social containers. They're moving away from static pages being searched and they're moving more towards dynamic real-time stream content. Like Twitter. Like Tumblr. Like Facebook. Those things have a better result because the penetration, the personalization associated with it, and the constant freshness of the content. So I believe that Google's search volume – the business Google is in on the search side – that business is shrinking. And they've got to do something about it.'"
How many here have ever posted a question on social networks asking their friends which laptop/smartphone etc. to buy? I don't. I either start from Google or go directly to Amazon.
I think "social search" is massively hyped up.
No wonder he is a "former" exec...
Or maybe volume is shrinking because Google has gone from an actual search engine to a giant shopping, friendfinder, news aggregator and becoming less useful by the minute.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I'll ask my friends for a recommendation once I've done a local search, but I'll use a text message to a person, not facebook or some other social media. Post it on facebook and the signal/noise ratio sucks.
Utter nonsense. When I need an obscure part for a broken appliance, I will not be asking my facebook friends. I will always use Google (or other search engine). It is just too instantaneous to ignore.
No, search is shrinking because the search "algorithms" are going to shit...
First, I don't want the search engines to "figure out" what I really want, I want it to give me what I ask for!
Second, I don't want slowness and crap on the screen (I stopped using the Google search webpage when they introduced that stupid fill-it as you type shit -- and No, I don't plan to be logged in to get something "custom"), so I now use zuulu... (but truthfully, I am on the lookout for a Google replacement, and No, BING doesn't even come close due to #1 above).
Third, have the right priorities, the priorities (if you want my search business) is to provide the links that actually have what I want, not a tonne of advertising with some buzz words (this used to work but when $$ got involved it seems these are always in the top 10 query results).
Just my one cent worth....
You shouldn't trash your former employer? Especially in public?
Maybe it's shrinking for Google, but maybe because more and more people are using alternatives. Like me.
And I want to go on record saying that the entire "Social Search" model is one of the stupidest ideas google has ever come up with. All of my friends and family have different career backgrounds and their own personal likes, when your using a search engine for reference, like for coding, my friend's FaceBook page is not going to help me out.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Already? Geez, Google's still the top page visited on the internet, and he's saying this? Then again, he could be one that's looking into the future where Google may not necessarily exist any more...
Google is becoming less like Usenet, and more like Amazon-was.
Was
Usenet = 100% geek stuff
Amazon = 90% where-to-buy 10% user ratings
Yahoo = Social stuff
Google = 90% Geek stuff, 10% manufacturers support
Now
Amazon 70% where to buy - 30% user ratings
Yahoo = What? What?
Google = 70% where to buy somehting 25% useful information, 5% links to other search engines.
I don't know who this guy is or what his history with Google was, but he sounds just like every other talking head pundit/consultant that is blathering on about social media changing the world and such crap. It's a very popular fad whose time is just about up.
I don't respond to AC's.
Traditional search is shrinking (but, mind you, is far from dying) because of huge topical sites that finally managed to develop good search engines. It's far easier to search Wikipedia, IMDB or Youtube for whatever content you are looking for than shuffling through the results of Google that will take you to those sites anyway.
The internet is populated by two kinds of users. People who get it, and stupid clueless losers. Always has been. Only now, the stupid clueless losers have their own walled garden: Facebook. So now the stupid clueless users are not forced to get a clue and use real tools, however poorly. They are free to become even more clueless day by day while using the abortion Facebook.
Slashdot readers are being asked. Slashdot readers are not the ones who ask.
The average knowledge about laptops/smartphones here is several magnitudes better than that in the laymen layer.
When I search I want information, not opinion.
I'm fairly sure the guy has a startup he's trying to peddle. Just wait for the IPO.
Having said that Google's search has noticeably deteriorated over the last couple of years. I often have to hit the Nth page now to find stuff I'm looking for.
Deleted
I'm shocked I tell you.
And to do so because Google isn't "social" enough. What an original thought in these days leading up to the facebook ipo!
Personally, I don't give a crap about what my idiot friends "liked". I want search to find things that are relevant- not necessarily just popular.
I hope his view isn't shared by google.
Social? Please. The majority of my friends using Facebook couldn't be trusted with advice for my new car, much less anything of more value. I'll do my own searches and filter thru TYVM.
Maybe as a part of the pie - but I think the pie is growing faster, and doubt the absolute volume is shrinking. Too bad TFAs don't have, you know, actual numbers.
One might ask one's friends about what phone to buy, or what's good in music, or what Joe Schmoe's phone number is; one might query a professional network for the answer to an complex algorithm or how many pineapples were exported from Hawaii last year, but at the end of the day, each of these questions is likely to be followed up by a Google type search.
Throw in smart phone use, and no, I just don't see the absolute volume shrinking.
Check your premises.
with investments elsewhere disses google. ok. twitter as a search agent? for what? where to eat? even if I asked a friend if they like their new car that doesn't mean I'm buying it (and certainly not without more than 'oh yeah its great' which can often really mean 'Its not as good as I thought so leave me alone I dont want to be embarassed stop asking me questions!;)
The area I think google (and the other search agents) can improve is relevancy and classification of results. Search is not dying but its growth rate may hae peaked in the developed world (who is not online? what would make you search more than you do now (on average)?)
I guess it depends on what you're looking for.
Opinions, of course, are a good thing to look for on Facebook/social networks. Factual information isn't; even if the information you get is good they're probably just going to end up sending you to a result they got through Google anyway. It's also a decent place to look--assuming your friends have similar interests--if you don't know how to formulate the query you want. For example, sometimes when I'm searching Google I spend the first couple of searches just trying to figure out what the search term I'm looking for is. Search engines don't tend to do well when you can only describe a concept and not name it, but other human beings are really good at parsing that sort of thing, assuming they know the answer.
Local information is also good if you have local Facebook friends. Finding a contractor, for example, or a daycare or dog walker or whatever. These people have to be local to you anyway, so if your friends have any experience with those local businesses their opinions are going to be highly valuable.
Factual searches, searches where you know exactly what you want and just need to find it, those aren't great for social networks. You're just offloading the work of actually searching onto your friends.
So is he right that the search market is shrinking? Yeah, I'm sure he is. The better question, however, is whether it is shrinking in any meaningful way.
I've found a nice crowd sourced search engine, 4chan.org/b/
All these sites have "powered by Google" search.
I don't think these sites are building good search engines. Even when I know the information is on Wikipedia or IMDB, I'd rather use Google to search them.
To give an example - I just tried "site:imdb.com Gyllenhaal secretary" on Google. Unsurprisingly it led me to the IMDB page for the movie Secretary in which she (very sexily) stars. On the other hand, putting in the search terms "Gyllenhaal" and "secretary" in the IMDB search box, gives me a lots of info on ... Kofi Annan. (Nothing against the man, but I'd be surprised if he was in *any* spanking movie, yet alone a really good one.) There is a link to Maggie Gyllenhaal on the page as well, but nothing leading directly to the movie.
Even if I don't know much about the advanced features of Google, just putting in the search terms into Google - without the "site:imdb.com" part - would give me a full page of relevant results, a youtube clip of the intro to the movie, the IMDB page, the wikipedia entry etc.
Essentially if people are using the IMDB search engine to look for stuff on IMDB, then they are not using the full potential of that site. If Google's share of the search market is shrinking because of that, then they should try and make people aware just how much better they are at searching.
I've interviewed with 10 different people at Google. I asked every one what they thought google would do when facebook took over the search space because people wanted to go to the sites their friends recommended rather than search for pages. No one had an answer. Their other current services are so much smaller, the company is going to have to go through radical downsizing if they can't come up with an answer to this.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
They will start charging for some or all of the services (besides search) however I find it hard to believe that more people want to search is social networking, that maybe because I find things like Facebook banal, and Twitter narcissistic, I continue to hope that I'm just cynical, but maybe most people are stupid and stuck on themselves and the triviality of their friends.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The most basic user story:
1. go to www.google.com.
2. search.
is really how people are getting shit done. I can see niche search, like Wolfram, or maps.google.com, or Amazon for products, but social search is bs.
I read somewhere about 2 years ago that YouTube was the #2 search tool. If you want to look at a video, people go directly to YouTube to find the video. Why go to Google for that extra step?
Every blip or countertrend will always be accompanied by some jackass on the internet explaining how some established paradigm is "dying". Usually, it's some tech blogger desperately trying to goad readers into clicking on his story by being provocative, and it's usually a loaded question, because actually saying what is implied is flat-out ridiculous. When Linux on the desktop finally reaches two per cent. Some jackass will post a blog with the title "IS MICROSOFT DYING?" It's really really really overdone, especially when you consider that it's nonsense. Dying means that Death is imminent, and death is nonexistence. You could argue that nothing that isn't a life form can die in the first place, and you'd usually be right. People are still putting on Greek tragedies. Indeed, somebody somewhere is probably WRITING a Greek tragedy. So Greek Tragedy is not dead. It's not even dying. And "traditional internet search"? Hell, that doesn't make any sense either. Has the web been around long enough that anything about it can be considered "traditional"? Besides bullshit, I mean.
Kofi Annan was in that? Wow, the things I learn from the Internets.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Some notes:
We all know how the intelligence curve works, right? Really smart ranges get *more rare*, while Google's PageRank values *more common* results. So the link farm companies had their day building 100 sites that all link to each other with little else on it but a list of hit words.
What we need is an engine that gives smart answers, now How is Babby Formed type stuff. Problem is there might be only 5 copies of a good answer out there, and lots of junk ones.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Never heard of him. I had to Google him to find out that he was Google South Africa Country Manager from 2007 to 2009...
sentiment of optimal job hunting strategy was to go out and start asking everyone you meet on the street, up to and including canines and sign posts.
Should file this under "dumpster diving"
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
What if all your friends are idiots?
Most people just go to the store or ask a techie friend. They don't do Google research.
If you don't think traditional search is a dead-end, then maybe you'd like to explain why Google is turning its search engine upside-down and integrating Google+ everywhere in spite of the uproar. It's because Facebook has outright replaced the web for many people--email, news, videos, casual games, it's all coming through Facebook. Google knows that social is the future and that if they don't do something, they'll just be another Infoseek getting replaced by some hot, new thing.
Of course that's not going to ring true for a site full of Linux-loving techies who avoid social networks and think searching for esoteric computer parts is what everybody does. But in the mainstream, people are using Facebook all day long for almost all communication now.
Sure...but on the other hand, as soon as you start typing "Gy" into imdb, Gyllenhaal comes up complete with a photo and a big-name movie (for both Jake and Maggie). And if you type in secretary, it brings up an option to go straight to the movie page--without even having to type Gyllenhaal too. So I'd say that's quite a win for imdb. You don't need to know who is in the movie, you don't need to be able to spell "Gyllenhaal"....
Google has been optimizing their system to provide better answers to dumb questions. This reflects the most popular searches asked of Google. Google has strengthened their emphasis on currency, locality, and popularity, at the expense of depth. The general observation is that Google has been "dumbed down".
That emphasis puts Google in direct competition with social networks, which are, of course, focused on currency, locality, and popularity. That's a problem for Google. Especially since the social networks all have their own internal search capabilities.
Google still has some big competitive advantages. The biggest is that ads on search results are presented when someone is looking for something, and thus aren't an annoyance. Ads on social networks just get in the way. Ad clutter on Myspace was a major factor in their demise. Spam on Twitter is becoming more of a problem. Facebook traffic stopped growing in mid-2011. The social networks may be hitting a wall on advertising revenue.
From a business perspective, Google has the problem that they don't pay a dividend. They try to pretend they are still in their growth phase. But their stock peaked in 2007. There's nothing wrong with being a profitable company, #1 in the field, and paying a dividend. But Google keeps trying to grow in other areas, none of which make money. Google's revenues are 96% ads, 4% everything else. Investors would prefer they get out of phones and social and focus on their core business. Meanwhile, Bing nibbles off another 2% or so of Google's market share each year. Microsoft has staying power - the entire first generation XBox effort lost money. Now they're winning in game consoles, while Sega is nowhere and Sony is in trouble.
> Nothing against the man, but I'd be surprised if he was in *any* spanking
> movie, yet alone a really good one.
Nice try, but I am not googling "Kofi Annan spanking movie".
Log in or piss off.
You forgot:
Now
Usenet = mostly dead
A former Google exec says he believes that traditional search volume is shrinking (but offers no reason for other people to share this belief) and then spends a lot of time offering explanations for what factors might be causing the effect which he hasn't provided any reason to believe is happening in the first place.
It's fairly rational be skeptical that the effect is happening at all. Its less rational to assume that the general effect asserted by the former exec without any substantiation is a real effect, but that it is specifically effecting Google rather than general traditional search. That's just more pushing personal bias as explanation for (yet another) phenomenon for which no evidence has been provided.
Let's see some reason to believe that there is an effect to explain before offering explanations for it.
I've never been all that much into serious drugs, so I simply can't imagine what this guy is smoking. It's so beyond my experience that I'm just in awe, and a little scared to try to think too hard about what it might be like. To totally let go of reality like that, without so much as a thread to ever lead you back, to leave the world of senses and reason behind and journey completely into the imaginati-- sorry, getting off-topic.
People might be messing with social networks to aid search, but this is high-hanging fruit with low utility. The people you know, almost never have the information that you want. And even if they did, they almost never publish it in advance of your question (and you're sure as hell not going to want to wait for an interactive reply). And even if you're very lucky and someone you know does know what the error message means or does have the widget you're contempating and has formed an opinion about it, that's one. One is rarely enough.
Word-of-mouth is useful but it's "push" -- it's something that just happens regardless of whatever you want, with information you almost never sought out. It doesn't help a damn bit when you are the initiator. And initiating queries is the whole point of search.
This guy is in a totally different world. He must be googling phrases like "good new band to check out" or "recent news" or other stuff that search engines can possibly supply, but aren't usually used for.
P.R. bullshit.
Google's use has shot up due to in-browser search bars. Who the hell wants to go to facebook or twitter to find something not facebook- or twitter-related?
My guess, without doing any research, reading hte article or these comments: This former exec is touting software from an up-and-coming company designed to (gasp) aggregate and mete searches between content providers.
People talk about drivel getting posted to Slashdot lately, I've seen a couple good examples and a couple bad. This one is a good. Example. Of drivel.
One thing I read that I am now wary of is that targeted search and social media is creating an info fishbowl. Instead of getting to see what is in the world you are starting to get just what is in your region or what you peers are clicking. There should be a push back to at least allow an option to have regular worldwide results returned. And social media? No way I ever go there to find out anything especially to buy. Something happened or organizing maybe, but that is about it.
I was bullshitting with a buddy yesterday and we stumbled upon a similar topic. Not about google in particular, but rather the Internet as a whole becoming more and more like TV and how search engines don't have a place in that world. We all know the content cartel would love for the Internet to become TV, so we must assume they're trying to make it happen. My opinion at the end was that the phasing out of search on the Internet will be the beginning of long, painful spiral to Internet "channels". This idea is not novel -- I've read it here on slashdot more than once -- but I think its starting to actually happen.
Google search and + combined into one. Facebook. Twitter. Bah. Pretty soon we're going to buy our bandwidth from ISPs and then pay for access to the Google channels, or the Facebook channels, or the Fox channels, or just go to Time Warner (Net)Cable and get their econo-package that includes everything you don't want plus the one thing that you do want that's exclusive to TW(N)C.
The Internet may route around censorship, but does it route around greed?
What this guy really means as that advertising is changing. Searching is fine. Google quickly had to find a way to monetize search results and they grew into a advertising firm or sorts.
So yes from google's perspective as an advertiser it must be troubling to not have such a firm hold in the "social media" space.
If you know the "Gy" bit, then you are right. Try "gillenhall secretary" though - no problem for Google, no results for IMDB.
No matter kind of comment this FORMER google exec says, google's search engine will always be my first place to search. These other sites have their complementary values when associated with search engines to get there in the first place, but these facebook, twitter, tumblr sites serve entirely different purposes. Google's search engine is broader in search than simply going to facebook for example. If you simply use facebook, you won't find anything outside of the facebook's walled-garden because that's the way they market it. When you're looking under every rock for something, you don't want to limit yourself to just facebook or just twitter or just tumblr. Facebook/twitter/tumblr impose people to login before viewing any of the public content which is inconvenient. These sites are selfish as they are walled-gardens forcing people to register accounts with them before content is released through the internet. Slashdot on the other hand has a different approach. Everyone may view slashdot content that they found from google's search engine without logging into slashdot. Which makes it available to all on the internet and not just slashdotters. Slashdot is a pseudo-walled garden because you need to register an account to post comments. Privacy and anonymity are account options. Paying money to slashdot as a premium subscriber does ensure access to the most recent update articles which don't go public for something like 24 hours. It's an edge if you're desperate to have that edge. That edge means google's search engine doesn't see premium stuff for last 24 hours if I understood correctly. Information found on facebook/twitter/tumblr cannot be worth more than information found on any other web sites to the extent that it's worth BILLIONS$$$. Google itself is priceless and almost universally accessible because it has links to every website bringing value to every website in a sense of coopetition.
In response to Mr. Masie: "Those things have a better result because the penetration, the personalization associated with it, and the constant freshness of the content. So I believe that Google's search volume – the business Google is in on the search side – that business is shrinking. "
IMHO I believe he is wrong. Google's business will not shrink. It will ever expand due to the nature of web search engines infinitely finding web pages wherever they may be, on public web sites, pseudo-walled-gardens and all-out walled-garden web sites. The bottom-line is walled-gardens(facebook, twitter, tumblr) will never replace traditional search engines, but the traditional search engines will get smarter in terms of how they pass-thru the walled-gardens in order to deliver on their promise: indexing the entire web and making it available on as many devices as possible.
For the longest time, I used a search engine to help me figure out some programming issues. Now, I tend to go directly to StackOverflow and its related sites because (1) there's (sample) code that I can look at to figure out whether I'm missing something; and (2) people tend to be interested in providing helpful info. The times I use a search engine are when (a) I have some specific error message (compiler, some program I'm using, etc.); or (b) I'm looking up a tag/method/etc. that's new to me.
I wouldn't consider StackOverflow et. al. to be a Facebook/Twitter/etc. kind of "social container" because I think it has two primary goals: (1) Ask questions specifically to get help, and (2) Answer questions specifically to help our your fellow StackOverflow user. I don't see Facebook/Twitter/etc. having those two goals as primary (e.g., anything goes). I do consider it a "forum", which is like a social container but more focused/purposeful.
You're exactly right. Take a look at comscore for dec 2011:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2012/1/comScore_Releases_December_2011_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings
More than 18.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in December (up 2 percent).
Nov 2011:
More than 17.8 billion explicit core searches were conducted in November.
Oct 2011:
More than 18.0 billion explicit core searches were conducted in October, marking a 6-percent increase versus September.
Go all the way back to April 2010:
Americans conducted 15.5 billion searches in April, up slightly from March.
Where's the decline? Whoever fired him is really good at their job.
I just read the last four tweets sent out...perhaps commentary here should be directed at the following versus the sensationalized snippets in the article published;
Tweet 1 : No!! Google is not dead! Google Search is not dead! But, the rapid evolution of "real time social streams" of information discovery is real!
Tweet 2 : Online data discovery's evolutionary points; "Pages to streams...today to now...me to we...items to data" - Kevin Kelly
Tweet 3 : Google's notion of "universal search" is becoming more difficult due to non-index'able data islands of "real-time social content streams"
Tweet 4 : Examples of the search wars: Siri: bit.ly/nigEBm Twitter: bit.ly/kV79w9 Facebook & Google & more: bit.ly/Auw2Bw
Found @staffordmasie
Except that there is no evidence that traditional search is shrinking. This guy asserts that such is the case and submits an explanation as to why without ever backing up his assertion. Several people have replied elsewhere that there is evidence that traditional search is not shrinking.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I don't know if there are enough of us doing serious technical/scientific searches to constitute more than a rounding error in Google's search numbers. But if the market for 'social' searches really is tanking, then I wonder what would happen if Google made itself better for 'real' searches? You know, as good as they were 5 or 6 years ago? Would their search numbers be significantly better?
I mostly use Google for researching electronics information - component data, repair manuals, and the like, as well as circuit topologies and theory for design projects I'm working on. In my experience, Google is much less useful for this purpose than it used to be. First off, they automagically change my search terms to what they think I'm looking for, instead of what I really am looking for, so I have to click again to get what I wanted in the first place - this is a several-times-a-day occurrence. Second, their 'allintext' operator, (which I never even had to use several years ago, when Google worked better), does its intended job less and less these days - cached results often don't contain at least one of my search terms. Third, their seeming inability to screen out content farms, (which I can usually identify simply by viewing the summary), slows down searches. Fourth, the automated preview crap they now put on the right side of the screen, slows things down too much, and is awkward and distracting. Fifth, having to use NoScript to disable said nonsense slows me down on those occasions when I DO need to allow Google to run JS for some reason.
While Google's stated intention has been to provide more relevant search results, every 'improvement' they've made seems designed solely to increase the number of matches, and relevance be damned - to the point where they actively undermine the tools that they themselves have provided to refine searches.
I suppose some of these deficiencies might be fixable to some extent if I had a Google account - but with Google's stated and demonstrated intention to rape everybody's privacy, I'd rather not let them get their hooks into me any farther than I already have.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Until Netcraft confirms it, I have no reason to believe Stafford Masie's claims about anything dying.
A lot of y'all are sort of missing the point of the term "market" here - Google doesn't make money from searches, they make money from search advertising. Search advertising is more profitable with nebulous, subjective queries for which Google search does a decent, but not great job, but is potentially replaced by social search/recommendations. Search advertising is less profitable for those types of searches where Google does a near perfect job - locate specific pieces of information, consensus best solutions, or specific pages on specific sites with bad internal search engine.
What annoys the shit out of me is when I google something and the first several links are to god damned facebook posts.
Of course Google ranking on a percentage of search queries is shrinking, because lots more people are searching for utterly banal stupid stuff their friends said or linked to on a social networking site. So Google doesn't do as well on almost completely content-free searches as Facebook does. So what?
And I thought searching for obscure programming errors on Google was difficult enough, asking people on Facebook won't even get me the luxury of finding a forum thread of the same exact problem 3 years ago where the OP went: "Ok... nvm. I fixed it" and never provided a solution before the admin closed it.
> Nothing against the man, but I'd be surprised if he was in *any* spanking
> movie, yet alone a really good one.
Nice try, but I am not googling "Kofi Annan spanking movie".
At least not from work... :)
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
I always search them through Google anyway. I use Chrome, and I have added a custom search engine 'javascript:void(location.href='https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=%s+site:'+location.hostname)'. So when I want to search a site, I just go to the address bar, type 'site', and press Tab, and voila! I've got a 'custom' search engine for every site.
Actually I use that for smaller websites, for Wikipedia I just add 'wiki' to the search query. If I want to find a movie in imdb I type it's name and the imdb link is usually the first one anyway. If it's not I just add 'imdb'. I use only Youtube's internal search more than Google, because Google gives only 2-3 results with thumbnails from Youtube unless I add 'youtube', and 'youtube' is 7 symbols, so it's too much typing. The reason I use the internal search is because with Chrome's omni bar I can type 'you', press tab and type my query directly, which is less keystrokes than adding youtube to the google search query. I never search by going first to youtube's home page and then typing my query.
There are social network 'haves' and 'have nots'. Some people have 500,000 twitter followers, and can ask just about any question and get a slew of responses, some of them excellent. Some people have 15 with nary a high school graduate in the list; getting insightful and timely answers from that list is not nearly as likely. People with hundreds or thousands of followers think that social media is going to change the world; they literally do not realize that not everyone has the same type of network that they do. That, in fact, they are blessed with a surplus of social power in the same way that some people have wealth.
Search engines don't care how many friends you have. They have answers. Search is an equalizer; social networks are not.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Yeah in Opera you can do something similar directly in the address bar, it lets you set keyboard shortcuts for search engines, so I can type 'g something' for searching Google and 'w something' for searching wikipedia etc.
I think these guys missed the mark by a long shot.
People aren't just "searching" any more. People have "apps", "portals", they have go-to places to get things. Google isn't where you go any more. People know what websites they want to use or they use the iPad or iPhone apps to find things. I believe it's the "app" revolution that changed the dynamics. People go to wikipedia to research stuff, open one of their apps to find a recipe for dinner or ask siri what to get for lunch.
I don't find myself using Google less, but I certainly do rely on specialized social sites for specific information more so now than before. Generally when I want the answer to a specific question, Google can't always give it to me, and there are places I can go to get a straight answer faster than having to figure out the exact wording I need to use to get Google to pull up some forum post from 2005 that may or may not be related to the question I asked in the first place.
Example: If a domain you own expires and is deleted, does your personal information disappear from WHOIS records? Google doesn't know. The millions of results it generates are just about people complaining that their personal information is available under WHOIS and the only thing they can do about it is pay a recurring fee to a proxy service to hide it. I guarantee not a single one of you can find the answer to that question on Google no matter how you phrase it. Yet in less than the amount of time you've taken to read this comment, I could have gotten the answer just by asking someone (you don't need to answer it, it was just an example).