Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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'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.
That's where G+ rules and FB sucks. You ask FB to for the best active current regulator bias circuit for a ERA-3 MMIC using all SMD parts and you get "yo doggg I hear you like MMICs" or "is that a kind of weed pipe?" at best. You ask your G+ ham radio builders circle and you get three guys who've already been there / done that.
The reverse is true. You post "how bout that ball game" on G+ and the ham radio circle as a group tells you to F off and keep that shite out of their circle. That kind of triviality is what FB was meant for.
I deleted my FB a couple years ago now, but I'll keep G+ around for awhile, I think.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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