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82 Comments
- mattnyc99, on 04/16/2008, -3/+40dugg for FACEBOOGLE! i smell a catchphrase...
- TheChunt, on 04/17/2008, -0/+24So the next time SQL Server spits a new error message at me, I should throw it into my Facebook status and hope one of my ex-girlfriends from high school has some insight?
- johnroth, on 04/17/2008, -3/+18Uh... does this guy even know what he's talking about?
- bacon_skoda, on 04/17/2008, -0/+14this article assumes everyone is on board with social networking.
i don't think that's true. i've been to digg and myspace and it's just as much spam as the rest of the internet.
if i need to find the manual to a digital camera, will myspace friends tell me?
udder bullcrap article. - inactive, on 04/16/2008, -3/+16Nothing can take down google!
- ribo, on 04/17/2008, -0/+12Some VC is trying to talk up social networking. Sorry, finding things will never go out of style.
- ThndrShk2k, on 04/17/2008, -0/+12It may be in-depth and such, but I assume it's fears are for naught.
The internet may be social, but look what kind of social it is.
I'd rather have my heartless algorithms ruling my day than me ruing the day I ask for a bunch of guys help alone (who also don't use the googles). User created content is fine and all, but unless the users have NO ***** LIFE, they can't find ***** robots can.
Obligatory quote: I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS - tecknoplasma, on 04/16/2008, -2/+13Google is more than just a search tool, much more.
- searcade, on 04/16/2008, -1/+11Google has a mind too you know, it could keep up with the future.
- dafunkmonster, on 04/17/2008, -0/+10If Facebook is the (forgive the pun) "face" of the internet of the future, as this article so boldly predicts, I want no part of it. I'd sooner destroy my computer and move away to become a solitary mountain man before I let my wonderful Google search engine be replaced by an idiot-consulting, socio-virus bot.
- AntidoteSqrd, on 04/17/2008, -0/+9This is utter crap. Outside of my close circle of friends I'd say everyone else I know has ***** for brains when it comes to certain subjects. Search engines have access to all knowledge on the internet... mostly and are immediate. What's better, typing 'C++ Assertions' (just an example) into google and getting a response immediately or going to facebook and sending a message to all your friends asking if any of them know about c++ assertions and waiting for someone to tell you something.
- kizzyle0508, on 04/17/2008, -1/+9Facebook seems to be on the outs anyways
...
It was much cleaner before it became Myspace - edzilla, on 04/17/2008, -0/+8The internet is not ONLY about social networking (and thank god for that!!)
- inactive, on 04/16/2008, -2/+9A very in-depth article. On a sidenote, I'm curious why the author believes the term “Web 2.0” should be "be violently abolished from the lexicon."
- mozert, on 04/17/2008, -0/+7so what is "Social Networking" again? buried down for talking about ying without defining what is yang.
- cmdrNacho, on 04/17/2008, -0/+6social networks consist of a bunch of random people asking to want to be my friend and me just pressing the accept button, because I don't want to decline someone I may or may not know, resulting in thousands of friends, that really say nothing about me , and resulting in results that are completely irrelevant. BRILLIANT!
- djdole, on 04/17/2008, -0/+6I agree, I really don't think he does.
- trogdor282, on 04/17/2008, -0/+6Social networking and search are not gonna kill each other because they don't overlap. Google finds you what year the war of 1812 happened. Facebook finds you that hot girl whose name you were too drunk to remember. I think social networking is more likely to replace email than google.
- MAGZine, on 04/22/2008, -0/+5Yes, because Facebook will start to index the entire interwebs as we know it, again.
Give me a damn break. The closest thing that will happen is these companies will use a search API. You can't just stop web search -- billions of dollars have been dumped into it to prefect it.
That, and I'm not signing into a damn service so I can search the web, and I'm certainly not waiting for Facebook to load; that's one of Google's best features. Its just a damn phase/web trend. Web 3.0 will usher in a period where everyone wants to be alone, and not connected. Things will be worse then, though; because noone will want to use Facebook because it turned into MySpace; and it destroyed the G. - inactive, on 04/17/2008, -0/+5"How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It"
Not gonna happen. - mokodo, on 04/16/2008, -14/+19Search is dead. Or at least that’s the opinion of one tuned-in venture capitalist I’ve been getting to know this year. We were recently discussing the drawn-out Microsoft-Yahoo-Google showdown and its larger implications when my fellow futurist issued his bold statement as a sort of summary dismissal of the whole multi-billion-dollar battle. In his opinion, Silicon Valley’s Big Three are fighting over the scraps of the last decade of innovation while there’s a sea change taking place in the way people use the Internet—one that may leave the Web’s biggest players holding all the cards to a game nobody wants to buy in to anymore.
Such a prediction probably seems ridiculous when Google has a market capitalization five times that of Ford and General Motors combined. After all, Google has developed a superfast, highly efficient method of making sense of the most overwhelming mass of data mankind has ever created. What’s more, the company has set an extraordinarily ambitious goal for itself to increase the overall load of data by digitizing every book ever made. All this, while reinventing the business of advertising as we know it.
So what is my VC friend talking about? The larger the Web grows, the more important search becomes, right? That’s probably so, and as a note of clarification, he changed his statement slightly to say, “Search, as we know it, is dead.” What he means is that, with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?
Actually, the issue is even larger than searches and social networks. The Web is, in a sense, maturing into a different medium than the one that search engines were originally designed to tackle. Allow me, for a moment, to oversimplify the issue in the interest of making a point: Until now, the Web has largely been a resource for information organization and consumption, with the user functioning as a consumer. In this scenario, a search engine is an ideal tool—you need some information (a restaurant address, the name of a song stuck in your head), but you don’t know where to find it, so a search engine is the natural first stop in your online journey.
But in the past few years, a bunch of sites have begun to pop up based on the philosophy of user-generated content—a phenomenon often referred to as “Web 2.0” (a term, which, if I had my way, would be violently abolished from the lexicon). Flickr, for instance, is predicated on the notion that people don’t want just to look for photos but to share them. Same goes for YouTube, more or less. This, in turn, led to an explosion of online communities—once you’ve amassed a bunch of content to share, the natural next instinct is to create social bonds around it. This, of course, is the online equivalent of what people have been doing for centuries: finding other people with similar interests and forming social cliques, or vice versa.
This is not a totally new phenomenon. The Web has, since its inception, been used as a social tool, with community discussion boards for tech heads, bird-watchers and so on. But what is new is that the interfaces have changed to allow each member of a community to have their own microsite—an identity on the Web that is unique and centralized. And this focus on online identity is what could turn search upside down.
Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering in charge of search quality, spoke with me about this phenomenon—and his thoughts on Google’s goals as the reach of mobile devices, advertising and more expand—in a rare interview this past week (click here for more of the Q&A). He suggested that Google’s search could quite naturally evolve to embrace the data produced from social networking. “Search has always been about people,” Manber said. “It’s about getting people what they need. The art of ranking is one of taking lots of signals and putting them together. Signals from your friends are better, stronger signals.”
But what may turn out to be the strongest signal of all is the footprint you make with your online identity. Consider how much information you voluntarily provide on your Facebook profile. Now imagine if you could combine that with your Netflix renting and Amazon buying habits. Then throw in the suggestions of your friends and the pages you visit the most often. All those various sources of information about you are currently stored in different locations—on your computer’s browser history, on your Facebook page, on the servers for Netflix and Amazon—but just imagine how accurate a search could be if every time you had a query, the mass of data about you that exists on the Internet could inform the results. (Google and Yahoo already do this to a limited extent by tracking your search history to refine results, and surely startups will try.)
In fact, 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. As new content enters the Web, it could tumble through the various filters that you set up around your identity and then show up on your home-page news feed, or in your in box, or pop up on a ticker that follows you around as you browse from page to page.
The point is that even though Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon and others all have elements of this new relationship with users, nobody owns this space the way Google “owns” search. And as it evolves, there will be an unholy mess of privacy and security issues to work out. So in the future, the way we are guided around the Web may look very different from search as we know it. In the meantime, search is not, in fact, dead … yet. - fkr3, on 04/16/2008, -2/+7Because it's come to mean some trivial and pointless piece of crap, usually that some kid slapped together in his bedroom with Google ads as a business plan. The number of sites trying to redefine some trivial task we do, or creating a whole new pointless task for us to do, is ridiculous.
- djdole, on 04/17/2008, -0/+4Haven't even gotten into the MEAT of the article yet and I can already tell the author is full of hot-air.
FTA: "Google has a market capitalization five times that of Ford and General Motors combined."
...Hot-air and SPIN that is.
Hmm, Ford & GM? Nice choice for the comparison. Granted they are well known brands, but in that context how is that impressive?
Ford is doing bad enough to be closing many factories nationwide and GM posted a $38.7 BILLION LOSS in net income for 2007.
If you want to do a proper comparison you need to choose a better gold-standard. - ahuxley, on 04/17/2008, -2/+6What do people expect?
A generation knows nothing but point and click.
They dont code, care, understand or really want to learn.
Give them software to make candy sites or IM and they are happy.
But as clicks are $, its perfect.
Enjoy sitting in front of the intertube?
Turn on, dial in, drop out. (yes as in abandon all constructive activity) - inactive, on 04/17/2008, -0/+4I wish more Digg users would use search before they posted.
- alexkball, on 04/17/2008, -0/+4Oh yeah, because Popular Mechanics is all of a sudden a bastion of investigative journalism and rational thought. I'm not saying everything in this article is false, just that I'm not going to bet the farm on search going the way of the dodo because of facebook and myspace...
- hockeyrox20120, on 04/17/2008, -1/+5wayyy too much time was put into that
- inactive, on 04/17/2008, -0/+4Hey, sometimes you press the wrong letter, sometimes Ctrl+V sticks.. Things can get messy fast.
- tcpip4lyfe, on 04/17/2008, -0/+3Yeah crtl-c and crtl-v is pretty hard....
- sporad1c, on 04/17/2008, -0/+3I love the way it points how much information about ourselves is out there that we just gave away. The government doesn't need big brother, just a myspace account.
- cmdrNacho, on 04/17/2008, -0/+3From slashdot..
They do not need a search engine to find out what their friends think, they can just talk to them. This strikes me as a way to further estrange people from each other by allowing them to filter out any dissenting views before they should be forced to confront them. Beyond being a dumb idea, it's socially harmful. This sort of searching will result in information from "opposing sides" of controversies or arguments being deprecated, resulting in skewed information being available--because people tend to associate themselves with other people of the same opinion.
Also if I added 10000 friends to my myspace because im a douche... how does that really help what my real interests are. chalk this one up as marketing ploy - TheChunt, on 04/17/2008, -0/+3Taken........and very NSFW.
- P522, on 04/17/2008, -1/+4No, Google doesn't own search. Maybe on the free Web but not the subscribed or academic Web. No way. And of course search is not dead.
- Genma, on 04/17/2008, -0/+3nobody's killing anyone, this is pretty much just a bunch of pointless econobabble attaching dollar signs to some current trends that may or may not collaborate to create the next. if anything none would exist without the other so it's kind of impossible for this to happen, web 2.0 is just a term of insecurity to justify mass appeal.
- mdude85, on 04/17/2008, -1/+4No offense to Web 2.0, but the vast majority of so-called user-generated content on the web is utter *****. Really nothing I would ever care to relegate my search to, because it tends to be submitted by people who are under-informed and over-vocal. There is such a fog of ridiculous user-submitted cat photos, personal blogs about some guy's trip to the grocery store, mindless political rants, stupid Top 10 lists that no one really cares about, ... the list goes on and on. And don't even get me started on the hundreds of thousands of people who sit in their living rooms and tape themselves talking into a webcam about lord-knows-what and then upload it to YouTube.
There have been a lot of great things about Web 2.0, but until all the rest of the trash gets cleaned up, the current search environment is just fine with me. - ahtu, on 04/17/2008, -0/+2This guy is talking about feeding you content you "want" to view based on your habits online.
That's not really what I use Google for. I know the best sites about things that interest me, I don't need to search for them.
Most of the time you search for a pretty specific solution to a problem you don't know much about. I think that's the strength of a search engine really. It doesn't try to be smart and tell you what you may want to see based on your Myspace habits, it does what it's told. - krnldmp, on 04/17/2008, -1/+3Aw *****.
- eddy23170, on 04/17/2008, -0/+2oh for digg to do this automatically....thanks
- 1view, on 04/17/2008, -0/+2This is laughable. I like most people use web search a lot, not to find out what my others peers are interested in but what's relevant to the question at hand. Like what's 30 degrees celcius in farheight, how do I compile a said program, what is the population of some city, bus maps for some city, whatever it is it's ridicious to say Googles method of typing in what you want and getting the answer is dead because social networking is becoming successful. Sounds like some dumb venture capitalist interpetation of their success that couldn't be further from truth. Yes social networking is successful but for people connecting with people, not information.
- searcade, on 04/16/2008, -5/+7Gooface sounds better!
- gdgi, on 04/17/2008, -0/+2*****
ever tried to search for a cool article that you remember seeing a few days ago on Digg? Completely impossible.
Try searching for anything remotely USEFUL on sites like facebook etc - completely ***** useless.
Search engines are useful because they are focused tools for finding information - without the rest of the ***** included.
Not that sites like google are perfect mind you.
The one thing that Google needs in order to stay relevant is the ability to get it to 'ignore' certain sites or types of sites. Alot of the time these days searching for information on products just serves up page after page of 'ecommerce' sites that are basically ***** and useless.
Oh well. The internet is DOOMED i Say - DOOMED... - yellowfish04, on 04/17/2008, -0/+2yeah Jimmy, that's what they'll do! very good Jimmy!
- christh0mas, on 04/17/2008, -0/+2LOL. Very well put.
- bacon_skoda, on 04/17/2008, -0/+2This guy is literally describing facebook's beacon software.
Eric Cartman, did you write this article? - mikebaldwin67, on 04/17/2008, -0/+2Social Networking is a passing fad. You know something is destined to die when Popular Mechanics labels it as the next greatest thing in the world.
- whoreable, on 04/17/2008, -0/+1When I want to find pictures of spiked hair douchebags or fully clothed college chicks with fake ***** or maybe even visit a free webpage of some horrible wannabe musician, I will use myspace or facebook. For everything else I will use google.
- pritchypritch, on 04/17/2008, -0/+1At first I thought this was utter attentionwhore ***** but then I realized that I always search Digg first for web, graphic, and/or cat resources before I resort to the spamhole known as Google.
- Pct1theory, on 04/17/2008, -0/+1beast of bible? wtf?
- searcade, on 04/17/2008, -0/+1lol i visited gooface.com pretty nice actually they might beat google.
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