The Flux in Free Search
July 16, 2010
I liked the good old days when the azure chip crowd and the data satraps would point out that Google was number one in Web search. For most people, the idea that Google.com was the number one place to go when looking for information was okay. Life was simple and the PageRank method generated useful results for most queries. Something was working if two thirds of the search traffic went to the Mountain View outfit, right?
Now something is changing, and I am not sure I like the shift.
First, I read Fast Company’s article “Twitter Now the World’s Fastest Growing Search Engine.” The key factoid comes from Biz Stone (great name for sure). He suggested that Twitter fields 800 million search questions per day or 24 billion queries per month. Google, according to my addled estimates is in the billions per day. The key point is that Twitter continues to gain search traction. Twitter is an information utility. Each time the addled goose writes a goose-based post like this one, we fire it out to Twitter. Believe it or not, people tweet about our articles. Yesterday our Yahoo story was fired around. I am not sure if that helps or hurts Beyond Search, but it is interesting to me.
Second, I read the New York Times’s “Friending the World” article in my hard copy paper on page B-1 and B 8. You may be able to snag a peak at this url under the article title “Facebook Makes Headway Around the World”. Don’t honk at me if you have to pay. The point of the write up is that Facebook is getting big and fast. In India, where Google’s Orkut was the big dog, Facebook is sniffing at Google’s chicken korma. What happens if Facebook’s search starts gaining traction?
My view is that Google may find itself having to work hard as it did in the 1998 to 2003 period. With free search appearing to be in flux, Google may have to take prompt action to deal with the upstarts Facebook and Twitter. My hunch is that these two services continue to grow because people like the addled goose figured neither had much of a change in a Googley world. As I say on my About page, I am often wrong. Perhaps this is an instance of how the addled goose cannot see the 20 somethings accurately?
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2010
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