Does Facebook Represent a Google Killer?
I saw a really interesting (and controversial) viewpoint by Robert Scoble that I thought was very fitting into my look at Facebook this week. He contends that Facebook, along with Mahalo and Techmeme, represent a force that will spell trouble for Google within the next four years. Here, check out these videos by Scoble:
Part I of Social Graph Based Search. 14:41 minutes.
Part II of Social Graph Based Search. 15 minutes.
And a bonus round III. 6 minutes.
His theme was very similar to that of Jason Calacanis, who spoke about Mahalo at Gnomedex. Jason’s point was that the SEO industry has reduced the value of search engine results, and that human-powered search was the answer to it. Scoble elaborated in these videos, talking about the concept of a social graph based search. The idea is to use the power of trusted community to determine what is important.
Mahalo is a human-powered search engine in it’s early stages. I still remain a bit skeptical about the model. He is paying a group of people to approve content into the search engine. It seems incredibly high maintenance and damn near impossible to pull off given the scope of the internet. And most searches entered into Mahalo illustrate to me the very incomplete nature of the Mahalo database. Some searches garner good results, but many more arcane searches generate almost nothing. I admire the point behind Mahalo, but I still doubt the ability of it to keep up with the net itself. Scoble gives his opinion of this on his third video.
Techmeme makes more sense to me. The content of the site is generated by a trusted network of bloggers. In other words, it is a social network of tech bloggers who use the trust of the network itself to determine what is important. It is not a search engine, which is what I think is the major chink in Mahalo’s armor.
Then we come to Facebook. Facebook is a huge network of people who are interconnected. Scoble says straight up, and rightly so, that many people don’t understand Facebook. At this point, I would put myself into this category. I am investigating now to get the big picture. What I do see, and what Scoble points out, is that the Facebook network is an indicator of trust. For example, if I have a bunch of friends on Facebook, it may be an indicator that things that I write are more trustworthy. If this kind of thing was coupled with a service like Mahalo, we get the basis for a social network based search. A search based on social authority, not one based on how well I fool the search engine algorithms.
Google is all computer powered. Since a computer lacks human judgement, it can be fooled by SEO specialists whose entire lives are spent trying to deconstruct Google and learn how to fool it.
So, what do you think? Do you think the social networks represent a platform that will eventually evolve to a Google killer?
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Personally, I like techmeme. Not enough to replace google. Mahalo is actually very interesting. It won’t replace Google, because there’s waaaay to much content on the web for any group of people to document even a small slice of it. (Though it did work well for me when searching music)