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November 13, 2006
Finally reading The Search
I finally got around to reading The Search - a tale by John Battelle which reviews the history, growth of primarily search and Google. The debate on Google as a media or content company is compelling and seems to be echoed throughout the tech community. I am only about half through the book at the time of this post.
Ironically I originally though of Google as an ad network - they simply have strong technology that provides the most relevant and fraud-preventative ads to external site partners - which accounts for roughly 40% of their revenue.
The point the book reinforces for me is just how relevant search ads are. Thinking back to the days of Webcrawler (an AOL acquisition) - user driven search has always been the launch pad for the user.
Personally I am finding Googles search results less and less accurate - seeing how aggressive promoters have become in Google spamming the index is constantly being bombarded by malicious marketers. What is more impressive is even though I might be dissatisfied with Googles specific results - their distribution channels are so well established I find the as a lazy person i default to using them regardless..
Looking into the future, social search seems to be the answer - a index made for me from my peers, and the system would most likely anticipate my needs based on search history, time of day, schedule, etc - so that instead of me inputting my needs into a small box, it would simply predict and deliver me the specific results that were most probable for me at that time. That concept ties AI to search - and my guess is the next "big" thing in search is not search - but computer driven results delivery. Putting search beind the scenes and simply surfacing the results - which is all we are really searching for in the first place.
Posted by Michael Jones at November 13, 2006 02:33 PM