How Social Networks May Kill Search as We Know It 209
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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Re:oh god (Score:5, Funny)
But seriously I think most of us are thinking the same sentiment.
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Re:oh god (Score:5, Funny)
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facebooger, gooface, it still sounds like someone sneezed w/o a kleenex handy.
Re:oh god (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:oh god (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why would I _care_ about someone I obviously drifted apart from years ago if I drifted apart from them in the first place?
Live now, not then!
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This is one of the few good reasons why I th
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Thank you, thank you. I'll be here again Thursday night.
Re:oh god (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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In 50 years they will laugh at our "ooh no somebody just had sex" political scandals.
Unless we get conquered by Muslims or something.
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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
There is a phase in one's life where you need to advertise; birds do it with coloured feathers and elaborate dances, and teenagers looking for a partner do it with coloured feathers and elaborate dances. You have to advertise your availability, until you are no longer available, then it makes sense to hide.
The problem with social networking sites is that the feathers aren't real. And the false image of the feathers stays forever.
I, too, am regretting the purchase of that modem so many long years ago, bu
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But you don't have to put anything questionable on your page. There's nothing inherent in myspace etc that you couldn't put on your homepage. So I think some people will lose jobs over it but they will get jobs eventually and learn their lesson.
Much scarier is what corporations and governments may want to do with that info.
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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 we
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Trouble is....99% of the companies out there are more of the holier than thou ones that you mentioned.
No we're not in the IBM everyone the same don't make waves phase thing...but, still, most companies are scared shitless of any kind of controversy. In their minds, controversy may trans
Social networking and Wikis (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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In opera I believe it is enabled by default. Typing "w [searchterm]" will load that page result, usually the direct wikipedia page.
In firefox 3b5 you can right click on any field and set it to be a search engine. Just go to wikipedia.org and use that one, or click the icon next to the search bar.
Regardless it's hard to beat f6 w searchterm for speed.
Re:Social networking and Wikis (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Noticing where you were (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Push Media (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Push Media (Score:5, Funny)
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That would be the part where intelligent algorithms are needed. Hopefully it would observe that the content correlated poorly with love for things Man Was Not Meant to Know, and not bother using your Cthulhu fan club contacts to decide whether to recommend it for you.
Obviously, for this to be interesting, you need both good algorithms and (lots of) good data. Without either, the other doesn't help much.
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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?
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Should we rename it ... (Score:2)
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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
"Faceboogle"?!?!? (Score:4, Interesting)
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"?!?!? (Score:5, Funny)
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You will need at least LSD.
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I will try later tonight and post my results.
In this day and age he's probably high on pills anyway..
I think "futurist" is becoming actually becoming a viable career path now. You don't even have to implement anything, you just spike a small barely working prototype, create a new word and bam, you're a fucking genius.
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Pirate smilie with a hook caught in their bad eye?
Could have been worse... (Score:2)
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Koon-ut-kal-if-fee.
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I used to work for a company that was convinced the next big thing was going to be vertical web portals -- Vortals.
But I think you may be right.
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Pics or it didn't happen.
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Wrong assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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?
Beer Can Chicken [about.com]
;-)
Barbeque first aid [safekids.co.uk]
Barbeque Stain Removal [howtogetridofstuff.com] - alternatively Carpet to match your barbeque sauce [shawfloors.com]
White Carpets [shawfloors.com] and Carpet Installation Guide [doityourself.com]
Consider yourself pushed.
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New to you, sure; but that doesn't necessarily mean that its something that people who have an otherwise-similar online footprint to you aren't also interested in. So its conceivable that "Faceboogle" might have some utility.
Then again, I doubt the correlation between different users online footpr
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The Faceboogle concept assumes that I want to search just for those things which already match my existing online footprint.
Not at all. The idea here is that you pick friends based on what you have in common with them. In which case, it stands to reason that what they think as relevant is a reasonable determinant for what you think is relevant. Think of it this way, how many times have you searched for something because a friend of yours was telling you about it? I have blogged [blogspot.com] on this.
Not likely (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I don't know about that. When you update your status message to say: "Robert hurts when he pees." Faceboogle will automatically provide the probable diseases in your news feed.
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The internet is for learning about new things? Dude.. that's so Web 1.0.
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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. O
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Context is important (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're a parent planning to remodel your daughter's bathroom, for example: even though this may be the first time you've ever searched for fixtures with gender-specific decorations for children, a search engine that knows a bit about your demographics could probably give MUCH better results when you type in "tub
Web searching + research (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Unsolicited ads for duct tape (Score:2)
If Google, or any other search engine, hammers home the idea that they keep track of your IP address and past searches it could cause an outcry and a demand for privacy. Connecting ad content to past searches is exactly such a hammer. A significant number of internet searches involve sex. If a user starts getting ads for duct tape because they previously did searches for "hamster duct tape sex" they might suddenly get behind regulations that would control the way Google used information.
For the humor
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seems kind of orwellian (Score:2)
Suddenly Peter Doofus is linked to his own content, and, well, things pretty much unzip from there. I have a lot of misg
One big happy Google Search (Score:2)
Yeah, because I want advertisements (Score:2)
What if everyone just say down at their computers and allowed themselves to be passively inundated with whatever they were told to like. Wouldn't that be wondrous?
I don't doubt that such targeted advertizing is going to increase dramatically in both power and sophistication over the coming years - and that the percentage of ads I see which are for things that I might actual
HELLO TO THE STATIC PERSONALITY (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
static const personality (Score:3, Interesting)
For now most of those facets of my personality are separate. Someone
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The person trying to quit smoking will keep getting cigarrette ads jammed down his throat.
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There's more interest in this on the ad side (Score:4, Informative)
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.
What's up with all this social networking? (Score:2)
I have mailing lists for discussing particular activities or fields of knowledge, good, 'ol full-text search aided with a bix of context for searching on the web and a group of actual friends for socialising, not a list of other peoples' accounts that someone labeled "friends" for no good reason when making the UI.
Is there actually anything this all "social networking" is good for?
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Do not want (Score:2, Interesting)
Quotes like "Search has always been about people" show a fundamental ignorance of how most people over the age of 25 use searc
but then... (Score:2)
Will not work (Score:2, Insightful)
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 de
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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 interest
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In the future more information will be online, but also with greater control. The campaigns that succeed wi
Re:Will not work (Score:4, Insightful)
Google's success has everything to do with them recognizing the internet is a pull medium.
I'm tagging myself? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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I remember trying out ICQ, the first IM program, when it was brand-new and I was in college. I didn't like it then, and despite several attempts to get along with my friends by using the dominant IM protocols over the next several years, I never could see the reason for it or the usefulness of it, when email was so much superior. I haven't used IM in many years now.
Faceboogle isn't that bad. (Score:2)
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Yeah, but then people would have started calling it a didi. Ew!
-Mike
You're right (Score:4, Funny)
Lijit (Score:2)
Artificial Intelligence and Personal Agents (Score:2)
Faceboogle (Score:2)
Um, folks? Not everyone is on Facebook. (Score:2)
This is an extreme case of assuming that your peer group represents the rest of the world. Not uncommon on Slashdot, but still.... Get over yourselves.
Two words: RSS filtering (Score:2)
This allows me to create a single RSS feed where all my hundreds of subscriptions are thrown in, and the filtering provides the desired volume of good posts from those sources. The opt-in nature of RSS, combined with the machine-learning
Re:Start your watches. (Score:5, Funny)
Here you go: In Soviet Russia, faceboogles you.
For the record, "faceboogle" sounds like something that happens at the end of a pr0n film.
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I put the over under at one week.
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