Just read a very interesting article on the future of search. The bottom line for me was pretty clear: Google Search is broken. Several of the core principles behind it are now obviously wrong.

Search is not about getting a list of web pages. The structure of online information is much more complex. If you’re looking for some help on a particular Java library, you wouldn’t expect Google to return you a link to every single page of a 50-page online manual: the whole manual is the information unit you’re looking for. If you’re looking for opinions on a new Wii game, you should expect a list of forums, with for each forum, some insight into how many posts refer to the game, what the overall sentiment is, etc. The posts may be on one same web page, or they may not, and this does not matter.

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Filed under: Search, Social Media by Fabrice Retkowsky

Over the last 30 years, many tasks that humans once performed have been automated, encoded and passed over to computers. It’s the drive for efficiency that Bill Gates still talks about today. The internet however, never started off as a human-powered system so there was nothing to automate. But recently we have been witnessing the emergence of human-powered applications such as Social Search that are in some way competing with fully automated systems.

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Filed under: Quality, Search, Social Media, Spam, Technology by Giles Palmer

According to wikipedia “Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures.

The second paragraph goes on “Social media use the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to connect information in a collaborative manner. Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, message boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video”.

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Filed under: Consumer Generated Media, Public Relations, Social Media by Giles Palmer