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.'"

oh god

If anyone says "faceboogle" to me, I swear I'll knock them out...

Re:oh god

faceboogle!

But seriously I think most of us are thinking the same sentiment.

Re:oh god

Sounds like a term used in porn to me....

Re:oh god

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.

Re:oh god

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

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...

Re:oh god

Well, I know I'm a bit older, and slightly more paranoid about the Facebook/Myspace type social network sites....I basically have seen how things can be used against you later in life, and I wonder as the generation that has embraced these sites, and put out intimate details on their 'wild life', in both words and pictures, may start to shun the sites somewhat if predictions about how this information can (and I think will) be used against them in the adult world later on, when trying to get jobs, loans, and possibly other things that will increasingly use the internet/search for background information.

If this is the case, and people start being more cautious again about identifying themselves in meatspace on the social networks, this search trend might shrivel. On the other hand, this increased search capability of the social networks might help the scenario I eluded to above to be realized fairly quickly, since search for a person's background is made easier by those doing background checks.

Again...maybe it is my older age on this, but, ever since I've had my identity stolen twice, I've really started thinking Python got it right about the "Importance of not being seen".

I like to post on the net quite a bit, and while I know with some effort, I could be tracked even through here, but, I try to always use pseudonyms when posting, and often have used nym accounts and mail2news type services to stay anonymous even more on USENET posts. I know someone can find stuff about me, but, it would take more effort than just a quick search on a myspace 'search' like the article is mentioning....where with a simple real meatspace name, you can find out that a person like smoking grass, doing nude beer bongs (with pictures), and is open minded about the whole gerbil/Gere thing. If it comes between that person, and someone who pretty much makes it less than trivial to searched....who do you think will get the job?

Social networking and Wikis

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?

Noticing where you were

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:Noticing where you were

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.

Re:Social networking and Wikis

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.

Push Media

"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?

Re:Push Media

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

Well sure, but what if I belong to multiple social groups with differing interests? For instance, what if I belong to a Cthulhu fan group (just since we're having a con over here this weekend) and a fitness group. Will the algorithm try to tell me how to get fit with Cthulhu, or will it send me ads for both tentacle porn and diet supplements?

"Faceboogle"?!?!?

Derene may have some meat behind his newly-coined term: 'faceboogle.'

I literally spit out a mouthful of Diet Coke upon reading that. "Faceboogle" replaces "blogmarklet" as The Worst New Word Ever. (Although it's still less annoying than "__? Not so much.)

How does one get to become "high geek", anyway?

Re:"Faceboogle"?!?!?

How does one get to become "high geek", anyway?

Easy, you smoke dope until you think "faceboogle" is a neat word.

Wrong assumption

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.

Re:Wrong assumption

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.

Not likely

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.

Re:Not likely

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.

Web searching + research

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

HELLO TO THE STATIC PERSONALITY

Anyone interested in changing themselves for the better, anyone wanna make a happier life?

Remember how every time you tried something new in H.S. or somewhere your peer group push you back into the mold of you they thought was 'the real you'? Ever have that happen in life? With parents? With all your long-term relationships?

Now the web will do the same thing

HELLO TO THE STATIC PERSONALITY. We don't change, nope never happens. You just refine your search algorithm and help us figure out who we are by marketing 'content' at us. Yeah.

IMO, Phucked.

There's more interest in this on the ad side

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. [sitetruth.net] Ad rates on Myspace are very low [nytimes.com], 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.

I'm tagging myself?

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:Start your watches.

Cue the 'Soviet Russia' jokes in three... Two... One...

Here you go: In Soviet Russia, faceboogles you.

For the record, "faceboogle" sounds like something that happens at the end of a pr0n film.