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.'"

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Social networking and Wikis

[Raineer]

Not sure how google will outlive the threat from human-tagged information, both from social networks and Wiki's.

Ever notice Wiki is in the top three hits to EVERY SEARCH in Google?

Push Media

[Archangel Michael]

"the old concept of push media, but in a far more refined way.'"

You push it! You push it real good!

All joking aside, I have serious doubts that push media could account for my eclectic tastes. My friends can't even figure me out, how is a stupid computer going to?

Wrong assumption

[ColoradoAuthor]

The Faceboogle concept assumes that I want to search just for those things which already match my existing online footprint.

When I search, however, it's usually because I want to find information on something NEW.

Can it possibly be true that most searching is just for the same old topics--teenagers looking for the latest gossip on their favorite celebrity? Perhaps. But that sure doesn't describe how I--and most of the folks I know--use search.

Not likely

[Robert1]

This will never happen. For myself and most people I know, the internet is about acquiring information about things we aren't familiar with, not about rehashing information which we already know. Whether that information be used for personal enjoyment - learning something new for the sake of learning something new - or for personal research, like say looking up probable diseases you may have based on symptoms. For anything like this, social networking information will never provide you with what you need.

The only realm where such a thing were to exist is in adolescents. Your friend discovered an new Naruto website with awesome backgrounds and your interest in Naruto, which is listed in your profile, allows the network to make the connection.

Web searching + research

[davecrusoe]

Let's refine this a bit. *Perhaps* there is a use for boolg'ling web search content toward consumer taste. But it's likely that not many of my friends are researching topics similar to my own.

So, social tags would be relevant only for - let's pretend, here, c'mon - consumer taste. Everything else - like scholarly research, etc - I'm afraid has to be done the hard, old way - by knowing how and where to search.

--Dave

Re:Push Media

[evanbd]

By finding people with similar tastes, and showing you things they liked (well, more complex than that, but you get the idea). After all, if you have one in a million tastes, that means there are a couple thousand people online with similar tastes -- and several hundred of those even speak English. If the algorithms work well, then the computers have the potential advantage over humans of having *lots* of data to work with.

Re:Push Media

[Archangel Michael]

I can assure you, that my tastes are fairly unique. I doubt that there are ten people that have my tastes and interests.

That being said, Slashdot is one of my favorite places, not necessarily for Tech news, but rather for the wild assortment of people that visit here. I have a little in common with most people here. But I also have very little in common with most, individually.

How does a computer rate such things?

Re:Not likely

[MLCT]

For myself and most people I know, the internet is about acquiring information about things we aren't familiar with, not about rehashing information which we already know. Whether that information be used for personal enjoyment - learning something new for the sake of learning something new - or for personal research

Then you are not using the internet correctly. Don't you see? You aren't meant to want to "learn" anything new - all you should be using the internet for is buying things, passing meaningless chatter with "friends" to enable advertisers to better target you - and then look at those adverts. If you are using it for anything else then you are a p2p criminal who funds terrorists and you should be banned by your ISP.

The internet isn't a knowledge tool (at least as far as the global corporates are concerned), it is one giant shop where "consumers" go to buy things or be influenced to buy things. If "Facebook" genuinely cared about their users then Beacon would have been abhorent to them - instead they insipidly conceived and silently implemented it without their users consent. I am amazed anybody gives characters like that a single piece of information, they are absolute sharks.

Re:Wrong assumption

[vux984]

The Faceboogle concept assumes that I want to search just for those things which already match my existing online footprint.

Not only that, it seems to me that its assuming you only search for products (to buy). I can see how a review about a recently announced video card might get 'pushed' to me...

But if I'm looking for information about how to barbeque chicken, or how to treat a burn wound caused by hot barbequed chicken, or how to remove barbeque sauce stains from a white carpet, or how to install a new white carpet... really is that going to 'push itself' to me?

I spend a big chunk of my time searching for technical articles on very specific subjects. For example "how to bind an asp.net 2.0 gridview to a linq to sql datasource via an objectdatasource and support 2 way databinding, paging, sorting, using only poco objects outside of the data access layer, where the generated sql queries are clean and efficient (no loading 100,000 records when I only want 10, etc).

Or how to get dual monitors working 'just so' in ubuntu on an nvidia 8800GTS.

I don't have the slightest bit of interest regarding a 'how to' article on how to bind an asp.net 2.0 gridview to a data reader... I'm not interested in an NHibernate article, I'm not interested in how it might be done in Ruby, I'm not interested in how it was done during the beta,... etc, etc.

As for the ubutu search - I'm not interested in how its done with an ATI card, or with two PCI cards...etc.

And once I have my answer, I'm not generally really interested in more discussion on the subject.

I can't imagine how a 'push' model would do anything remotely relevant in a LOT of cases.

Re:Social networking and Wikis

[hedwards]

Google used to be a lot better, these days I get better results out of Yahoo. There's just too much crap that gets pushed to page one on Google because the algorithm failed to recognize that it was a typosquatter, search link or other site cheating to get to the top. Many times I end up on page two or three before I see anything that's potentially worthwhile.

I don't personally see any reason to use the #1 search engine if I have to put up with that sort of crap as well. It'd be nice to be able to black list sites or better yet IPs so that I have don't have to look at them immediately. Perhaps treat them sort of like repeated matches are now.

And yes, I do realize that it's not easy to keep enterprising cheats from gaming the system.

Noticing where you were

[SuperKendall]

Not sure how google will outlive the threat from human-tagged information, both from social networks and Wiki's.

Ever notice Wiki is in the top three hits to EVERY SEARCH in Google?

Did you ever notice you are on Google, and not the Wiki search page, when you make that observation?

Obviously there's a reason. Wiki's (esp. Wkipedia which I'm sure is what you were really referring to) are great resources but are certainly not the only link I look at in search results - even if they are the top hits in many searches.

Re:Push Media

[*weasel]

I have serious doubts that push media could account for my eclectic tastes. My friends can't even figure me out, how is a stupid computer going to?

Easy. They'll simply send you everything and then let you turn off whatever you find annoying.
"the old concept of push media, but in a far spammier way"

Frankly, the idea is laughable. Never in the history of these half-baked schemes has a significant quantity of content honestly identified itself. So long as every incentive exists to game the system, and none exists to play by the rules, it will be useless.

Re:Social networking and Wikis

[twistedsymphony]

I've noticed that a lot, and I actually think Google inflates their ranking since they are usually a great resource, but I doubt they would ever admit it... Maybe I'm wrong though.

Google is setup to naturally favor sites like wikipedia. Wikipedia has a high page rank because it's full of useful information and links to lots of other useful sites as well as well rooted self linking and tagging (which Google loves) and it doesn't produce any kind of spam.

In addition to that, lots of people link to wikipedia with appropriate terms boosting wikipedia's page rank even higher... it just happens to cover broad enough topics that it seems to come up all the time.

I find that searching for movie related information usually gets imdb in the top results... it's just that these sites happen to be the most referenced on the web and Google caters to well referenced sites.

Re:Not likely

[Actually, I do RTFA]

For myself and most people I know, the internet is about acquiring information about things we aren't familiar with, not about rehashing information which we already know

True. But one way to find out about those things is to be told about them by a group of your peers with similar interests. Even /. operates like that. But, "all your friends enjoy reading about X, would you like to know about X as well" seems like a really good* way to learn about new topics you might enjoy.

*Good meaning effective. Other value judgements (moral, scary-big-brothery) not applied.

Re:Noticing where you were

[SuperKendall]

You are claiming Wikipedia is more relevant than google, or will become so.

I submit that if Google is always where you start from, it cannot be ever less relevant than Wikipedia. Even if it's mostly a wikipedia search engine! Even under the scenario of being a gateway into Wikipedia, it maintains relevance in that it's deciding what parts of Wikpedia matter to you based on what you were searching for.

Sure, google will always "exist", just as webcrawler and lycos still do, but their relevance isn't exactly impressive anymore.

But I don't use webcrawler or lycos anymore, which is why they are not relevant (no-one does). I do use Google, and I don't see that changing for me or most other people as not all information I search for is in WIkipedia. Possibly something else can replace Google but we've not seen it yet.

Will not work

[v(*_*)vvvv]

Because,

1) Desire for privacy will win out.

2) The data will totally get spammed.

3) Push has *never* succeeded online and never will.

There are more, but 3 is enough.

The internet is the ultimate pull media, and those who push stuff hate that about it, mainly because they can't get in our way.

Even the first ever push medium, the classic banner ad, has never gotten any traction. They get ignored. Newsletters are also overrated. Most mail that comes from sources that we opt-in and subscribe to get glanced and deleted. Only coupons are worthy of any motivation to act for most of us. Even ads inserted before movie clips are avoidable. Find us on a different tab, looking at something else.

The last time I clicked on a banner was in the 90s, and I think it was my own to check if it was working.

Re:oh god

[Bombula]

Facebook alone is enough to put me in a rage. But I guess I must grudgingly accept the fact that I am apparently one of only four computer-literate people left in the English speaking world who doesn't live and die by their facebook page. Ridiculous. My unborn children will hate me for sure.

I'm tagging myself?

[IronChef]

Since we are essentially meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships...

Speak for yourself, writer person. I don't use "social networking." I don't care what my friends had for lunch, and I don't want my ex to know who my next ex is going to be by virtually sitting them down next to each other. That's bananas.

I really should write a form letter to politely decline Plaxo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, etc. invitations that well intentioned people keep sending me.

I even avoid IM, because hey, why do I want to let 20 people know I am at the computer RIGHT NOW? SOMEONE always wants to talk. And if I spend most of my time pretending to be away or invisible, then IM has become a burden and not a help to me.

Old fashioned methods of communication like email still work great for me. I do not want to be transparent. If you do, you mystify me.

Re:Will not work

[v(*_*)vvvv]

I would argue that google won in the ad industry by not pushing. Whilst all its competitors continue to cram ads on their top page and infultrate their own search results, google has done its best to stay out of the way, and to push oh so slightly. Google may be pushing ads on their search results, but they do their best to push what is pulled, keep it to the side, and not spam you or get in your way.

Google's success has everything to do with them recognizing the internet is a pull medium.

Re:Will not work

[Grishnakh]

I don't agree, though I wish I could.

The desire for privacy is fading fast. Those of us over the age of 25 still care about it for the most part, but the youngest generation doesn't. This can be clearly seen in their wholehearted adoption of myspace and facebook, putting all the intimate details of their personal lives on the web for anyone to see. I predict that, within 30 years, the whole notion of "privacy" as a right will be completely forgotten, simply because the younger generations aren't interested in it.

Re:oh god

[daretoeatapeach]

Haven't you ever wondered what happened to your best friend from Elementary school? Your favorite acquaintances from college? It's not about chat. It is about keeping a link to people that would otherwise get left behind. As (at least in the U.S.) society becomes more mobile there is a strong desire to keep those ties. There's a lot of lonely people out there who treasure reading the blogs, hearing the music, and looking at pictures of former in-the-flesh friends.

Re:oh god

[TheLink]

"who do you think will get the job"

Depends on which company they are applying to and probably what else they have online ( OSS projects with great code etc those are all also part of the "plumage").

While it means that those people have a higher chance of not being hired by "holier than thou" companies, they probably won't be a good fit in those companies anyway - might not have as much fun in those companies too ;).

A fun company to join wouldn't care if prospective employees have photos of themself drunk wearing a silly party hat scattered amongst the social networks.

Nude beer bongs, smoking grass? I'm sure there are many bosses who have done that stuff before, and didn't think it was that bad. People hire people who are like them.

I've never done all of that, but I don't see that stuff as a huge problem, unless that person comes in smelling of grass/alcohol and looking doped/drunk then that's a very bad sign (you can always call up a bit earlier and say you can't make it for the appointment ;) ).

It will hurt them if the job market is really tight, but otherwise, I don't think it's as bad as people think. Furthermore when these younger generation become CEOs and HR people, a fair number of them are probably going to think it's normal to have such pics, and might even view negatively/with suspicion people who don't let it all hang out ;).

Now if there's evidence of them doing something vicious or malicious, in a manner where the context is hard to deny, then I think companies should think twice (esp if the culprit is the one posting it on his/her own page, unless maybe it's as an apology or something, but still...). It's kind of scary to have someone who might "snap" and bash colleagues/employees/staff, or do that just for amusement, and those traits will probably show up in other areas of their worklife.

I personally don't care if people link my posts with me. Ever since I've post stuff on the internet (more then a decade ago), I have assumed what I post can and will be linked to me. Google has thousands of hits of my posts etc.

Wouldn't you like to work with someone who was smart, not too lazy, competent AND _fun_? Maybe you can't have too many clowns around, but heck even a staid but wise HR dept might hire a "company clown" or two to brighten things up.