Friday, November 09, 2007
Forget Google, think social
Teenagers are becoming like their parents. Plus ca change...as the French might say. What is happening is that the younger generations are now seeking answers to their difficulties, to their questions, to their problems, from other people. Instead of resorting to search engines, they ask each other.
In the past, before the Internet came along, that's exactly what grown ups did. Whenever they needed an answer to a question they asked someone else who they thought might know. Only if they couldn't find someone to help, did they resort to directories or encyclopaedias.
Nowadays, those adults have been sucked in by the search engines and think the answer to all their problems lie within Google. But as a new report shows, people are increasingly dissatisfied with the results being produced by Google. However, grown ups plod on, in the hope that Google will change.
Youngsters, however, tend to more impatient. If something doesn't work, they move on, eager to find something that does. You might call it the petulance of youth, but it is more likely an inbuilt mechanism that helps human beings succeed. Successful adults appear to be those where this desire to find new ways of doing things does not wither.
Online, it has meant that teenagers are turning to friends and contacts on social networks to find the answers to problems, or information that will help them with their daily lives or even their businesses. Which means two things - firstly the days of search engines are numbered (and I've said that several times I know). Secondly, it suggests if you are running an online business and you are not getting involved in social networks you are going to lose out - big time. Forget search engine optimisation - it doesn't matter much any more anyway. What matters now is being where the market is - and that is inside the likes of Bebo, Facebook and so on.
Labels: social networking
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Readers' Comments:
At
November 20, 2007 1:26 PM 
said…
At
November 20, 2007 2:34 PM 
Graham Jones said…
Hi Rob, Thanks for your comment and I'm glad you like my blog. I agree with you that search does have a place at the moment. I am thinking more of the future. To see what I mean, spin the clock back to pre-Internet days. In those days the only "search" system we had was a directory such as Yellow Pages, or some kind of "catalogue" in a library. However, people only went to such search systems as a last resort. To find out information people always asked other people first - friends, colleagues, academics etc. In other words, to search for information people resorted to other people. Online, we haven't been able to do that until relatively recently with social networking. However, we've had eight years of search from Google, so there are some old habits which will need breaking before we all return to asking people first and search devices second.
I'm sure Google realise that - after all they are investing huge amounts of money in social networking technology.
Search won't go away, it will always be there in some form or another. But it will become a secondary means of finding information online, not the primary method it is at the moment.
Graham
An interesting post, as always - still reading your blog regularly after discovering it a couple of months ago. Just wondered though why you feel so strongly that the days of Search Engines are numbered.
I take the view that Search Engines are the hub of information providing raw, unrefined, inconsistently formatted information, just like they always have, but generally better than in the early days (but still with many faults, which I'll get to in a minute).
In recent years we've seen social networks evolve as the 'spokes' if you will, feeding information out from the hub but adding value and detail to it along the way. For example, as Seth Godin recently said in his blog - Google can find you five accountants in your town, but it can't compare them or tell you what a good accountant should do. A social network could help you find this out to some extent.
Social networks work because they have people like your good self acting as a conduit for information on their specialism (after all, I found your blog through your Ecademy profile). People like you are the people with the inclination and ability to find stuff on the web (be it through Search Engines, forums, social networks or whatever) but also to interpret and share it in a more user-friendly way than a Search engine might.
I think we'll always need search engines though - despite their current weaknesses - to find this raw information in the first place, it's just that they'll lose some of the attention they once enjoyed, to social networks.
Do you agree, or do you ever see yourself abandoning search altogether? Or have you already?
Keep up the good work
Rob