The Slow Erosion of Google Search | Hacker News Reader

The Slow Erosion of Google Search

bokardo.com

19 pointsmanchesterseo25 comments

I am not a fan of Facebook, I have never used Twitter, I am sure there are lots of others like me. There has been a lot of talk about semantic search over recent years, but just that TALK.

the thing is...even if Facebook or Twitter actually do it...there is nothing to stop Google from utilizing that same data themselves to power their own version of search.

Twitter's firehose is license-only. Facebook is a walled garden. There's a lot that Google can't necessarily reach for free.

If it really is valuable, I don't think Google would have a problem paying however much a license costs.

> If it really is valuable, I don't think Google would have a problem paying however much a license costs.

I'd agree but keep in mind that their data may not be available. Facebook has signed an advertising agreement with Microsoft and twitter has their own search engine that they bought.

If they thought having google crawl their data would cost them revenue then you can be sure they wouldn't let google access it for any amout of money.

So the question is: how many searches are real-time searches? 10%? 20% 30%?

Try something closer to .001%. Twitter's monthly search volume is probably about equal to what Google gets in the space of a few minutes.

I sort of think of Google as a channel changer for the TV. When I need to go from one place to another, I use the remote, but the bulk of my time is not spent changing channels - it's spent consuming the media that I'm interested in.

Agreed. The article implies that we all spent our time "hanging out" on Google before Facebook and Twitter came along. That's never been the case though. For better or worse Google has been and is just an extremely useful utility.

My dependence on Google kind of scares me a bit. I don't just use it for search, it's my calculator, converter (currency, temperature, etc.) and many more things.

And even if I chose to do those things manually (such as temperature conversion) - I could only think of going to google first to get the formula. I'm just glad Google is there to make my life easier.

It's my search engine, calculator, converter, stock-quote-checker, e-mail client, word processor, spreadsheet, chat client lately, local business directory, atlas, and employer. Hrmm. That makes it far more dominant than Microsoft ever was...

The author's main premise seems to be that since people are already on Twitter and Facebook, they'll just use that to search instead of Google. Aside from the fact that the results would be terrible, most people have Google search in their browser, which is all of 30 pixels away from the Facebook and Twitter search fields. Plus, I know that I'll be more likely to get the results that I need.

People are way too wrapped up in finding the next Google-killer.

I am a former Facebook skeptic, but after playing around with it a little I understand it's appeal in connecting and updating with friends and family. Don't know how they will monetize it, but when they find the right model, it's going to be epic. I no longer doubt it can be bigger than google -- in fact it almost certainly will be.

Hey folks, thanks for the feedback. The reason why I titled the piece "slow erosion" is that this will take years...I know how valuable Google is for fact-based searches. But slowly, social search and in-context advertising will gain, not because Google will get worse, but because people will be starting from a different place. They'll start on Twitter or Facebook.

The key insight is that people trust others for certain types of information such as recommendations. A single recommendation from a friend is much more powerful than a list of restaurants Google will give you. "Hey, I know you and I know you will like this restaurant". You could argue that Google will eventually know a lot about us (they do already), but the fact is that social interaction trumps reference material in a lot of cases.

So this will probably take years, and many of the arguments against are that right now Google is better. No denying that...but have you seen the ads on Facebook lately? They're pretty stinky, but twice as good as they were even months ago.

Try finding this on twitter:

- who was Joan of Arc

- the first movie of Elijah Wood

- the capital of Somalia

- atomic number of Molybdenum

Twitter search is good for personal interaction.

Google search is good for everything else.

btw, just tried both twitter and google with above queries and here is the result:

- twitter = nonsense

- google = right answer in first page

The next question is, for the sort of search that you can sell ads against, where will people go. And the answer is still google...

What about the sort of search like 'recommend a good restaurant in SF'? That's the sort of search you'd do on Twitter, where you know you get human replies not machine ones, or possibly a custom site like Yelp (still not Google). It's also the sort of thing you can sell ads against.

better yet, ask that on aardvark (vark.com)

got any invites for vark?

Huh, there hasn't been robots written to do that yet for Twitter? You'd think Twitter would have spam trouble like that, by now.

(I guess that is an open niche for people doing natural language interaction... 1/2 :-)

<cough>

Well, depends quite what you mean, but part of what I'm working on is understanding answers to questions like that. Without actively polling twitter (ie spamming 'Hey guys, what's...').

Search for [good restaurant in SF] on Google and you get a restaurant guide from the San Francisco Chronicle as the top web result. That's a lot faster than asking your twitter followers for it.

I would go to wikipedia for all of those.

Luckily, the first or second result of a Google search for each of those links to Wikipedia. I find it's faster to do a Google search and click on the Wikipedia link than it is to go to Wikipedia and hit Search.

Search for:

wiki Joan of Arc

wiki Elijah Wood

wiki Somalia

wiki Molybdenum

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