People Search: Potentially a Big Problem for Google
December 3, 2010
I am not much on the social thing. Geese flock, just not in Facebook. Geese land in Harrod’s Creek. We eat some bugs, honk at friends, and then move on. In “Social Media’s Interaction With Content More Trustworthy Than Google Search”, there is a different way to tap into information. Despite the reference to a graphic comic book, the guts of the idea seems sound. Humans curate comment better than Google’s algorithms in certain situations. What! People better than the Math Club’s numerical recipes? Here’s a heretical passage:
So whether you categorize LIKES as ‘social links’ or ‘peoplelinks,’ the Open Graph appears to be gaining traction over Google’s old school SERPs (search engine result pages). Since LIKES can be tied back to a specific user, searchers of content can now determine whether a link is vetted by people they follow and trust. However since Google and Facebook are rivals, and ‘don’t play nice together,’ it would take a lot for Google to gain access to Facebook’s social graph data to incorporate into their ranking algorithm. According to Clay, he thinks that “we’re going to see that LIKES and referrals and recommendations (will cause) a general shift towards ‘quality’ of sites (not quantity),” and that Google’s methodology will lose out to Facebook.
Potential trouble for the Google:
- Different demographic may embrace Facebook. Control of a demographic is a big deal.
- Advertisers may want the details about a specific membership centric demographic
- Facebook has screwed up and kept on going. Google has screwed up and seems to have another major ship on the rocks. I refer not to Street View or its staff retention problems. I refer to Google TV.
The Facebook Google thing is similar to the North Korea – South Korea thing. Fighting cousins.
Stephen E Arnold, December 5, 2010
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