Information is Power
Around 26% of World’s population uses Internet and this phenomenon has grown 380% over last ten years. Billions of data are floating all over web but this technology is still into its beginning. We all are moving in a high-tech society and those who have information will emerge as a winner. The concept is, Information is power – grab it as quickly as you can.
Information is power, true, but everybody doesn’t need everything available on internet. Digging into relevance, contextual information is the next step one needs to perform. Google, Yahoo, etc gives all the information you want for a specific topic but 90% of these results are not very useful. Also, they lack to provide categorical search.
For example, if I search for India in Google, it shows 42 billion results.
Do I need all of them? No – they all are not useful.
Then, how to get useful information out of it?
Can I have categorical information – something like, Sport, Politics, Business, etc?
When I search the same in WolframAlpha I get the knowledge related to India. Again, there’s nothing more than few statistical information. I tried this on search.twitter.com and all which I got was real time talks about India. The point which I want to highlight is – they all are good in their own domain but users still don’t have lots of flexibility when it comes to internet search.
Going back to information – Internet is a major source. It has all the data we want but we do not have any tool to get relevant data out of it. Search Engines, Yes, they claim to crawl almost everything on Internet but that includes lots of junk data as well. They bring everything which they can. They can’t understand the context of search. Proactive search is something they simply don’t care to provide.
Recently we saw how Facebook surpasses Google as the most visited website on Internet. What does this mean? People are relying more on recommended information than searched information.
Does that give a signal of how Internet search is going to emerge in future?
Yes, it does. We need more social search than static search. We need to involve context with our search results. It could be in the form of region, interest, source, gender or any other broad category. We also need to provide this flexibility to users so that they can get data as they want. They should be able to configure their own search results.
Google is a giant in this business but going forward the power would shift to those who can provide relevant search, contextual search.
Logically argued and interesting write-up. Agree with what you say here, 100%. and bing is also kind of folowing the google trend. so a me-too sort of thing.
In gmail now they have this thing, like links, newslinks, based on the areas of interest u select..just above ur mailbox..i think that sort of interest-based search is highly needed. Customizing is the need of the hour. Such as facebook allowing u to create ur own ads as a monetizing thing.
I think this may sound controversial..but could there be a general search (one size fits all) for everyone, and for premium users maybe..a more tailormade, needs-based search? Or is that too much to digest, seeing as we’ve always got our searches free..just something I’m chewing on, at the moment.
In my next write up I’ll talk about different strategies / plans organizations are adopting to tackle new search needs. Premium search plan is also one of them.
Cheers,
Ambuj
There could also be checkboxes..for different streamlined categories..such as region, Sport, Politics, Business, etc..based on which search results are thrown up. (still chewing)
Great! Waiting already. Happy writing 🙂
You are assuming that people are searching information on Facebook more than Google and that’s why it has become most visited website. I don’t agree with that. When I need information I will go to a search engine which is google, FB doesn’t even come to my mind. Facebook is visited so much because of the thousand games and applications it provides and it is also one of the most popular social networking site.
I think in a way it is ok that the search engines do not understand the exact context of our search. If they start understanding, they will also start misunderstanding and then we would have a hard time.
Sujata,
I never said that people are searching more on Facebook than Google. I said “People are relying more on recommended information than searched information”. For example –
If I get a friend’s recommendation in Facebook stating that this article is excellent – chances are high that I will go and read that.
If I’m a Web 2.0 guy – I’ll join a group in Facebook and will go through articles posted there.
The point which I want to make is – social search is getting momentum.
Cheers,
Ambuj
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