In this day and age the internet is forever changing. People throw around terms like Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 as if they were candy, when in reality, the former is frustrating to hear every four minutes and the latter is nothing but nonsense.
As the resident Daily Galaxy Geek (ooh, that’s should be my title), I was tasked with looking in to a story at Popular Mechanics, written by Glenn Derene. Entitled ‘How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It’, it was an interesting look at the future of internet search.
His story was sparked – just as this one is sparked by Glenn’s story – by a quote from a “tuned-in venture capitalist I’ve been getting to know this year.”
“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.”
His friend summarized, somewhat backtracking, by saying that “Search, as we know it, is dead.”
As someone who has been around the traps for a long time now, been involved in much of the internet revolution – ie, as a partaker, not changer – I feel somewhat qualified to give my opinion on this. I’m not just a full time writer, but a geek of some magnitude as well.
So I would have to say that search is not dead, but it may allow someone in to the passenger seat in the near future.
PM’s Derene made an interesting comment regarding the history of the internet; “Until now, the Web has largely been a resource for information organization and consumption…”
I don’t think I can disagree more. From what I’m aware of, the internet has always been very much about the user experience. Just look at one of the humble beginnings of the internet as a massive message board system.
IRC’s and message boards represent a lot of people’s introduction to the internet all those years ago. And while the access of information is very much a part of the internet, I would hesitate to ever suggest it was only about that until now.
But to deny that the user experience has grown of late would be similarly foolish. The introduction of site’s like MySpace and Facebook, and applications like Twitter and Flickr, have revolutionized the way that we use the internet. But, in very much the same way that the early internet was, today’s internet is about getting information out to others.
The only massive difference is the way in which that is happening. Everyone has been able to post photos online before, whether it be to message boards or sending files via chat, but now it is streamlined. In fact, that is the keyword; everything is now streamlined.
With the introduction of Ajax, and the inception of the social network, the manner in which that information flow is directed has changed, but the information flow is still there.
The premise of the Popular Mechanics article focused on sites like Yahoo and Google being useless in the future; that social networks would be where you got all your news and information. And while that is true to a point – there will always be a need for sites search engines to troll through the internet to provide us with the background to the news.
An example of Google’s efforts to digitalize the world’s information is in the form of digitalizing all the books that they can get their hands on. In the future, functions like this – in addition to the standard internet data search – are going to be invaluable when the targeted information becomes more and more focused.
Before I finish, I’ll just touch on one more point that Glenn Derene made in his article (which you should read). He suggests that in the future search will happen between an interlinking of all the sites that we visit.
“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.”
Is it just me, or has he forgotten or just ignored the privacy implications of just this sort of thing? Facebook has just gone through the ringer for not alerting people to a new service that publicized your purchases and doings about the internet.
People are frantically trying to keep a lid on all their information, and to suggest that the future of search will be the reverse of that strikes me as a little… naïve.
I’ll leave it at that, by saying just one more thing; add me on Twitter, I’m JoshSHill.
Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.
