Scoble on the Future of Search
Techcrunch posted a few videos from Scoble on the future of search, where he argues that Facebook, Mahalo and Techmeme will throw down Google from its mighty mountain. The full list of the videos is here. The idea is Social Graph based search. It will overtake Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!.
His first point is that you didn’t find the post through search, because the search engines do not know what is inside the video. First error there. Currently this might be true, but not in the long term. You might want to read Surviving Immortality by Cringely. Computers will become more and more powerful.
One of his big point is that Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook are SEO resistant, meaning resistant from spammers. The thing is though that everything normal people can do based on logic, a computer will be able to do eventually. Sure it is not easy, but it is something that will happen eventually. They will be getting better.
Techmeme, built a fabric by hand through linking behavior between the top blogs. This is good, but it is nothing that cannot be done automatically. It’s pretty similar to pagerank really, just that there is a person filter behind it. This is the people rank that Google has already talked about. Of course having access to a social graph, is something that helps to build this kind of trust graph. Did you know Google just hired Brad Fitz, LiveJournal fame, who is working on opening up the Social Graph, similar to what our own Dirk Olbertz does with Noserub. I shortly posted about it when I cleared my backlog. The push is going on to open the social graph up just because it really helps in creating your own search engine. Lijit is another search engine that is working on this. We are working on monetizing it at Ormigo through building a quasi-lead market that banks heavily on getting to know people and connect them with the best local merchant for their current needs.
As you notice, I really believe in the social graph bit. If I have a financial consultant, or a lawyer, a friend or even his friend, that lives in my town, might want the same one when needed. This is something that is already happening offline, but we are monetizing it online. First through allowing advertising of services through aggregation, but learning along the way how people interconnect. It’s again automated though.
One point Scoble has is that Facebook has been able to keep the seo spammers out, which seems to not be the case for e.g. Plaxo. I am not sure yet why an open social graph cannot keep SEOs out of the system. My friends are my friends and the graph increases the value of those friends for linkage.
All in all very good ideas, but I am not buying that it will replace Google.
Update: Now read this.