The Google+ Love Fest and Search
July 6, 2011
Right off I want to remind you that I am not social. I urge others to be social, posting useful information in online systems. These data are quite useful for certain types of research. So have at Google+, Facebook, and any other system that connects you to your friends, preferences, and images.
The excitement about Google+ is, I agree, interesting. I read “Google+ Is a Marketing Sensation.” I don’t have an opinion about the write up which seems fine to me. I did notice one quote that did hook me. Here is the snippet:
Searching Google News brings about 6,000 results for “Google +”, but only 85 for “Mac OS X Lion Gold Master”, which Apple released over the holiday weekend. Anything Apple is typically big news, if nowhere else than techdom. Not this weekend. There are so many good posts about Google+, search is the best way to find them. [Emphasis added by Beyond Search]
A couple of thoughts.
First, I assume the search is the Google search function. The statement underscores that the core of Google is search, not social. I think this is an obvious statement, but I find that search the Google way is a brute force approach which is becoming less useful to me. For example, when I need a very specific item of information, I am asking people. This is the method I used before online search became widely available to me in 1981. As search shifts from brute force to surgical inquiries, I think more than marketing is going to be needed to make any new system deliver results. Google has an interesting service, but Facebook, to take one example,has a head start which may be difficult to overcome quickly and economically.
Second, the information about Google+ is easily findable. Most of the services that I use to look for interesting developments provided summaries or original analyses of Google+. To locate these stories, I used news aggregators like www.dailyrotation.com and iPad services like Pulse. No search required. I think that is an interesting point. Maybe social is not going to be the successor to brute force search. Social is more of a “find a human” thing, not a Boolean search thing.
Third, I found the assertion that Google has become a marketing superstar fascinating. The company has the ability to get attention. The same excitement seemed to coalesce around Buzz, Wave, and in Harrod’s Creek for Web Accelerator. The viral uptake is great and I think Google knows how to play the “semi exclusive” access card at the propitious moment. Is this marketing? In a sense yes, but Google just attracts attention and Google+ draws attention. Now Google has to move from marketing to money.
I think that will be the test of Google+. Can Google find a way to sustain its online advertising growth. So far, the company’s attempts to diversify its revenue streams have been disappointing to me. I think that Google+ has to demonstrate more than marketing and more than chasing Facebook.
Stephen E Arnold, July 6, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search.
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