There have been a number of blogs related to issues with Google search and the ease that their results can be spammed. Fred Wilson wrote an interesting post on his blog today called Why Social Beats Search. In the last paragraph of his post, he states:
The Internet is a massive content creation machine. We are witnessing an explosion in the amount of content…most of it is garbage. But some of it is not. Machines can help us find what is good. But with the help of machines, our friends and trusted sources can and will do that even better.
I don’t agree with Fred’s blog title that “social beats search”, but I 100% agree with his last paragraph. What is needed is a hybrid model. I believe Google search is outdated in many ways since it does not reflect the changing realities of the web. With all of us engaging for hours each day in our social networks, we are searching and discovering using our social graphs. When a friend sends us a link, we will usually click on it. I don’t see Google’s model adopting to this new web given how ingrained its current algorithms are to the success of the company. It’s never easy to move away from your core competency.
With that said, I don’t see Facebook or other social networks solving this problem either. Their core competency is creating and managing the social graph. It would be very difficult for social networks to offer the assurances of comprehensiveness given that information is limited by the diversity of your social network. Social networks should instead focus on providing users with the richest social experiences possible and make our social graphs portable so we can leverage those connections in other web applications.
I expect the solution will be hybrid new technologies (hybrid meaning social and algorithmic) that take into account social graphs and new forms of indexing the web. Likely these companies will be developed as applications on top of social networks or very tightly integrated.
A simplistic yet compelling example of a hybrid model is FunnelScope (www.funnelscope.com). FunnelScope algorithmically crawls and aggregates content across travel sites. It then applies algorithms to rank hotels. But unlike any other travel site, it then overlays a social framework resulting in Personalized Hotel Rankings based on input from your social graph. In future versions, FunnelScope will allow you to “piggyback” on tangential social graphs so that you can expand your circle and not just be limited to friends in your network (which may have not have insights due to a lack of experience, for example).
Applying a hybrid model assures the user conducting a search comprehensiveness and comfort that they are not limited by their network. The result is a more fulfilling search experience where results are both comprehensive and personalized.
I realize that Fred Wilson was referring to general search in his post and I realize the complexities are greater, but the problem to be solved is similar. In FunnelScope’s case, it’s simply focusing on a niche market (travel).
My suggestion to readers is to try products that support social and algorithmic search, and help foster content creation. The benefits will be significantly greater versus how you currently search today in the form of better results and time-savings. Things we could all use, right?
