Friday, May 29, 2009

Searching for search and finding Godot

The battle for search eyeballs is heating up again. The model has been shown to work and Google is now Ad Mogul extraordinaire. Microsoft in classic fashion has tried, learned and is trying again. Yahoo has had much publicized struggles. Even new players are coming into the space. The buzz about Wolfram Alpha is everywhere.

What this next level of competition is about is relevance of information. The reason Google initially made inroads with search was their optimization routines and ability to give people search results that were relevant to what they wanted. Recent additions such as the ability to promote and bury links based on your own preference are continued iterations of this optimization. Similarly iGoogle and personalized history of search with functions like returning the link you clicked on last time you searched for something are again continued iterations.

The next generation of search is taking more of that sea of information that is out there and turning it into something useful. This is both good and bad. It's good/great in terms of making things digestible and understandable, especially when you are researching a particular topic. But it is less so when what is important is being determined for you and you loose some of the outliers. Outliers are where innovation happens. This is not to say that results don't get buried with a raw information return because they certainly do but just as with code and layers of abstraction, with great power comes great responsibility and the need to know what is going on behind the scenes. In many cases this behind the scenes is proprietary information and algorithms that companies (rightly) don't want to share as their secret sauce. What a dilemma.

Wolfram Alpha is the new kid on the block and have gotten a lot of Internet love with an effective launch that you could watch in video live. It's cool for checking out what happened on the day you were born, doing research on specific items and generally getting a quick easy view of relevant data to concrete topics.

Microsoft Live didn't really live up to what was desired by Microsoft but they are back and ready for round two with their new search engine Bing. (I thought that was the sound the Southwest ads used for new deals?) Bing is in pre-launch and is supposed to do a lot of what Wolfram does and use other proprietary correlation tools to give better and deeper results. ComputerWorld has a nice Visual Tour of the functionality to give a good idea of what is coming.

That leaves Google. Google's new exciting new news is the pre-pumping of Google Wave. If buzz on the Internet is any indicator there is a lot of excitement and potential here as well. If it wasn't clear why there was rumored interest in Twitter from Google it is now. Wave is intended to be a merge of... well... everything Just In Time.

So, it looks like the observation that the next generation of systems are about visualization and the presentation of information, not just finding it. Boy won't this be fun to watch.

Monday, May 11, 2009


The Hangout and the Bazaar

I have been more active of late in both the Twittersphere and Facebook universes and have a few observations to share. 

Facebook is cool and is a great place to connect with friends. New and old friends all in one spot. The feel is more like a social club or hangout than an internet site. This means that people say things (as many have pointed out) that they might not say in front of their boss, mom, or who knows who else. This has led to the two-face-book approach where people have their friends profile and their work profile separate. This way when you comment on the silly photo of your friend who has had too much to drink it doesn't show up on your bosses page and so on. After all, Facebook is now for old fogies. (I suppose that's me as over the course of a few weeks I had numerous friends ping and prod me to get online as things like school reunions become the talk of the day.)  It has the feel of being a semi-private club where what you say is sort of private though you know that it is subject to repeat. 

Twitter on the other hand is like a big bazaar on the internet. Everything is there and nothing is really private. There is an ability to keep your updates to only people you approve but it is not regularly done. There is a social etiquette followed regarding followers and following, numbers and post types, frequency etc. This gives a basic structure though there is the constant pressure of those attempting to use things for their own marketing (and annoying) messages. Just search on something current like #Startrek (Hashing is a way to mark tweets for easy search and trending)(The new Star Trek is a fabulous movie by the way, both Campy and High Tech and Throw Back and Modern all at once. GO SEE IT.)  

So I am using both. For different reasons. I love connecting with old friends and reconnecting with people I have lost track of on Facebook. I also love the raw feed feel of twitter though. It feels like the early days of Bulletin Boards when you could chat all day with people you didn't know connected only by your interest in computers and ability to type.