Posts Tagged ‘Google’

When entire world is going gaga over Facebook and Twitter, I see a new champion emerging at the dais. This champion is focused at its work. It’s not wasting time to do experiments but quickly grabbing the top influential folks of the industry.  Werner Vogels [from Amazon], Evan Williams [from Twitter], Dennis Crowley [from FourSquare] and Steve Case [former AOL chairman] are just few of them. The name of this new champion is Quora.

What is Quora?

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. This is the official answer from Adam D’Angelo, the founder of Quora. He wrote this while answering this question “What is Quora?”. At this page, you will find several other answers from Quora evangelists and Quora reviewerers.

There are some initial myths about Quora. Let’s take them one by one.

Myth 1: Many people will not like to join “another network”

My Views: I don’t agree with this notion. People love to try new things. They get bored with using same service. Change is constant and that’s why we said good bye to Orkut, MySpace and adopted Facebook, Twitter. If a new service is giving you a different dimension, a new way to satisfy your eagerness – you would love to try that.

Myth 2: Quora is for focused groups

My Views: In the beginning everything looks like a service for few people only. If you remember, Facebook was only for fun when it was started. Look at the scenario now. Every business wants its presense on Facebook. Same happened with Twitter. People were not sure as why they should use it. They thought it’s only for celebrities but that’s not the case now. I see the same with Quora. It may have some focused attention right now but going forward it will definitely have a broad appeal.

My experience with Quora

While preparing my blog SEO is overhyped I thought to get the opinion of others, especially those who are working in this industry. I asked a question on Quora and Interestingly the very first answer was from Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz. Other answers were also from reputed professionals. Isn’t it interesting?

Challenges for Quora

Every organization, be it a big one or small one, has some challenges. Quora has just started its journey and it also has some challenges. As I perceive, the toughest challenge in front of Quora is Quality and Sustainability.

Quality

Currently when you ask a question on Quora, you get quality answers from experts of the industry. It is possible as number of users and number of questions, both are less. When both will grow, the challenge would be to maintain the same quality. Quora will have to continuously attract experts from every spectrum of life.

Sustainability

The domain of Question-Answers is less traveled and less explored. The chances of getting initial success was high. Quora gained the initial momentum. Now, when the niche is known and some bigger players are also venturing in, the challegne for Quora would be sustainability. It would be nice to see as how they manage to beat the rest.

You can ask a question to me on Quora at http://www.quora.com/Nitesh-Ambuj

Quora still has invitation based sign up process. Let me know if you need one.

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.

“Yes, we could make history, I guess”, the statement from Sergey Brin was not just a mere prediction. It changed the history of internet like never before.  Many players like, Yahoo, AltaVista, Lycos were doing business, but it was Google who created history. It changed the way people were looking at search engines. It changed the way people were doing business through search engines.

In early years of this decade most of the web players were suspicious about a revenue model around search engine. The scene was looking very gloomy to them and then came the innovative search concept from Google, Page Rank. It gave Google an edge over others and Google never looked back thereafter.

As we say, “History repeats itself”, the scene around search engine market is changing again. This time there are some other new concepts which are gaining attention. No, I’m not talking about Microsoft’s Bing. I’m talking about Twitter, WolframAlpha and Scoopler.

A new trend called real-time search is getting popular on web. FriendFeed, Facebook and others have already started using it but two key players which are doing some real serious business in this area are Twitter and Scoopler. The idea behind Scoopler is to search entire web in real time. This would be a key concept for all future search requirements. We need to keep an eye on this. Check out one example of real time search here.

Stephen Wolfram says, “Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine with one simple input field that gives access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms.” Few experts claim that it should not be treated as a Google killer though going in details of this discussion gives a different view. Check out an article on this here.

Google still dominates the search engine market though the monopoly is not going to last for a long time now. Let’s hope to see some more innovative concepts.

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Yet another internet meme and this time it’s going bigger and bigger. As the typical nature of internet meme suggests, it’s spreading from person to person, inbox to inbox and from chat windows to YouTube videos. Yes, I’m talking about Twitter, the latest sensation on Internet. It is getting lots of attention these days. The craze is so that when we arranged a small tweet up in Kolkata, it was covered by media without any hesitation. When we analyze the usage of twitter, it gives interesting results. Starting from spreading business to connecting to the fan bases, it is being used for all possible communication channels.  I also found few college going students who are using twitter as their regular diary. This proves the diverse use of Twitter and that makes it vastly popular amongst all sections of the society.

When we look back at the history of Twitter, we would agree with the Wikipedia which says, “The tipping point for Twitter’s popularity came at the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas.” It was the event which changed the fortune of Twitter and it never looked back from there. It was an excellent marketing thought, well planned and well executed.

Looking at current developments in-n-around twitter it seems to be going stronger than imagination. It’s not going to be just a fashion mark on social networking turf but it’s going to challenge biggies like Google and Microsoft.   Very recently I read that Google is going to launch a search engine for micro blogging services like twitter, an important development in web world. Marketing experts are writing tons of theories as how an organization can leverage twitter for their business needs, one of those theories is here. Even the evolution on twitter has also become a talk of the town and online technical magazines like TechCrunch are also reporting it. These all developments show that Twitter is going to become the next BIG thing on internet.

Like entire world, I too have started tweeting. You can follow me @nambuj.

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