Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction? (GOOG) by John Northwick, Business Week (Feb 8)
John Northwick, who watched the AOL fall from innovator grace, offered this observation: " I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL."
(Mind, as commenters to the article did point out, John is CEO of betaworks, a Twitter shareholder.)
Search has moved into two main streams: video (YouTube and more) and real-time (Twitter watching).
Video:
* "YouTube generates domestically close to 3BN searches per month — it’s a bigger search destination than Yahoo. "
* "44% of YouTube views happen in the embedded YouTube player (ie off YouTube.com) and late last year they added search into the embedded experience. YouTube is clearly a very different search experience to Google.com. "
* "Video search now represents 26% of Google’s total search volume."
Notificator (the electronic message board)
This really means getting the buzz of the moment whether it's about friends or events and developments.
"Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues — lipstick on pig? — for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch — on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set."
It's the social context that is important - people you know (or know of), people you trust.
The post refers to an article by Gerry Campbell on the role of social inference in search. Search is broken – really broken. (Feb 6)
"Our daily lives are rich with social inference, and they happen in real time. Search from Google, Yahoo… you name it – they are all based on published (e.g. considered, thought-through) documents that take minutes-to-weeks to update in the search index."
Campbell wants to see "Realtime search, using social inference for discovery, ranking and prioritization."