Faceboogle? How Social Networking Makes Web Searching Obsolete
Of all places, Popular Mechanics published an article about the fact that Social Networking is killing web search. The article was, in my mind, not as “deep” as it could have been but sparked a good blog idea. The article reads as though incorporating Web 2.0 social-based content is more about adding social content easily to Google-like search results. In my mind, searching the web needs a change that I don’t think Google quite ready for. The “Web 2.0″ phenomenon has brought personal content into the limelight. Sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, allow people to create information for other people’s consumption. Putting knowledge on the internet is no longer for the companies that can hire webmasters (This site, for example, was a matter of installing an application, stating the way I wanted it to look like, and then just periodically add blog entries by way of text editor.). Consequently, categorizing information is no longer difficult, either (Not a solved problem, but one that there are available solutions for.).
According to the article, web sites like Google, which uses “robots” to “read” the internet and generate search results based on an algorithm of the contents of web pages, What types of information do I look for on the internet? It can be categorized into 4 categories: acquiring knowledge, topic research (like, for example, where to go on a honeymoon. Hi, Jess 
) , debugging problems with my computer, code (I am, after all a geek 
), and finding a company/organization web site. The middle 2 groups could be the same group, but for the purposes of the rest of the blog entry, bear with me.
Acquiring knowledge, in my mind, is a purely Web 2.0 phenomenon. RSS feeds allow you to subscribe to content that you are interested in learning about. News sites (like the major news papers), news aggregators like Digg, genre-specific sites like TechCrunch, Lifehack, and Generation X Finance. Acquiring knowledge is passive, as far as search is concerned; as soon as you have the sites in mind you want to read from, you just subscribe to them and you read them at your leisure. The question is how do you get to these topic/genre-specific sites?
Say you have a specific topic in mind–investing. How do you learn about this? If you’re like me, you’re going to go to Wikipedia and search on “investing”. You get a nice summary of the topic and then, hopefully, at the bottom of the page, there are a number of sources that you can jump to get additional information. This is by no means saying that Wikipedia is the place to go for information but it has matured to the point that one can enter just about any word or phrase and get results for it. The creation of a “Wikisearch” site, where content is added by users and evaluated by the community could then be used for topic research. It could also open a new industry where people could be hired to post content to these web sites and categorize it properly so that they appear in people’s search results. (Much like there are people nowadays that optimize people’s meta search data for companies so that their sites go up to the top of the search results.) As the number of sites increases for a particular search criteria, the results can be ordered in a way similar to news aggregation sites like Digg and Mixx.
Ok. You’ve learned about investing. You now want to research a particular stock. Well, now you need content-specific search. Google Finance compiles stock information. Google Maps compiles maps/directions. These are areas in which Google really excels and I actually use these more than Google Search itself. Content-specific search engines can compile large amounts of information that can be searched on domain-specific criteria. One can imagine a competition among companies to search for such information. In my case of debugging code or a hardware problem, one can always go to a vendor and search their knowledge base. What would be useful in this area is consolidating multiple site-specific search results into a single search site (appleproblems.com or ihatevista.org).
Ok. So you know you want GE stock. You want to research the company. Is it ge.com, generalelectrics.com, or gelectric.com? Imagine a situation where you just type GE into your address bar and are launched to the web site. Firefox has this feature by porting to the “I’m feeling lucky” functionality of google.com. But instead of google.com deciding where to go, again one can imagine the situation where you connect to a tag-based DNS server where you find where people most often go when they enter “GE” on the address bar.
Is Google obsolete? I don’t think Google will ever go away. Regardless of what technologies emerge for search, there will always have to be a “first cause” or “backbone” to the internet. However, Google’s search results are based on what an algorithm thinks is the most important and that algorithm is exploited by companies that are trying to get to the top of the search results. A community-mediated search engine would take the collective knowledge of content providers and the collective knowledge of content consumers to generate results.
UPDATE: There are some efforts to consolidate data from various sources. Yahoo Pipes, for example, allows you to combine data from multiple sources into the same page/feed/etc. However, in my mind, this isn’t the same as on-the-fly search results.
UPDATE: Here’s another context-specific search that I ran across. It’s specific to searching for mac information.