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.'"

Comments

Re:Oh really?

[tripleevenfall]

I think this is a major factor - people know where to find information now without having to ask Google. They know about Amazon, they know about Wikipedia, they know about their favorite news sites.

Google has its use, but people aren't having to use Google to find everything the way they used to.

Re:Oh really?

[1u3hr]

I think this is a major factor - people know where to find information now without having to ask Google. They know about Amazon, they know about Wikipedia, they know about their favorite news sites. Google has its use, but people aren't having to use Google to find everything the way they used to.

Well, I do. Rather than wrestle with learning where and how each site's search works, I just Google for what I want, plus, say "wiki" if I want the Wikipedia page, "amazon" for the Amazon page, (Rotten) "tomatoes" for move reviews, etc, etc. The hit on the desired site is always at or near the top.

Re:Oh really?

[vlm]

And just how many of my friends know what an indexable skiplist is, or the correct invocation of a particularl Windows API function, or a system for library cataloguing that integrates with AD, or the name of that guy in the film with that other guy? Precisely zero. If you've stopped tapping things into Google and are instead tapping them into Twitter or Facebook then, let's be honest, they probably weren't really worth asking in the first place. And anyone that answers will use Google to find the thing they read about that topic last week, etc.

Ahh you've ALMOST isolated the perfect market for "social search". Many replies on /. to questions are of the form of "here are the google search terms you didn't know to search for".

Example made up "ask /." question scenario: "Dear Penthouse Letters ^H ^H ^H err I mean Dear Slashdot, I maintain a medium size herd of Debian boxes from desktops to a compute cluster and I need to config them all the same and run a bunch of scripts on all of them once in a while. Oh noes what shall I do?". You'll get answers like "google for dish distributed shell, then run dish based scripts from a crontab" and "Google for puppetlabs and puppet" and "google for the following James Turnbull Jeff McCune Pro Puppet" If the dude knew what terms to google for, he wouldn't have to bug us here to begin with.