Stowe Boyd

Google’s Biggest Mistake: The Rise Of The Social (Post Search) Web

Near the end of a long, rambling discussion with Google’s Peter Norvig about making (and learning from) mistakes, Kathryn Schultz gets to where Google has stumbled hardest:

Kathryn Schultz, Error Message: Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Being Wrong

Schultz: What do you think have been Google’s biggest mistakes?

Norvig: I can’t speak for the whole company, but I guess not embracing the social aspects. Facebook came along and has been very successful, and I may have dismissed that early on. There was this initial feeling of, “Well, this is about real, valid information, and Facebook is more about celebrity gossip or something.” I think I missed the fact that there is real importance to having a social network and getting these recommendations from friends. I might have been too focused on getting the facts and figures—to answer a query such as “What digital camera should I buy?” with the best reviews and facts, when some people might prefer to know “Oh, my friend Sally got that one; I’ll just get the same thing.” Maybe something isn’t the right answer just because your friends like it, but there is something useful there, and that’s a factor we have to weigh in along with the others.

And being too focused on discrete goal-directed actions, like figuring out which camera to buy, Peter. 

The web is about people in a profoundly deep way: we are making it to happen to ourselves. Google certainly has missed that world, growing in plain sight.

We are not looking for cameras, we are becoming connected.

As I said in Can Google Go Social?:

Google made a pile by harvesting the latent value of all the social gestures we were leaving around the web in the form of links. These form the core of Page Rank and Google’s search/advertising business.

This was born in the paleolithic of the social web, where mostly we were wandering around as hunter-gatherers, turning over rocks, based on keyword search. The idea of social in those days was to send email alerts to people so they’d remember to read your blog and post comments.

But the social web has grown based on social networks — relationships between people — not hyperlinks between web pages. We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion. But they desperately want in on the next wave, but they haven’t found a formula yet. It’s not Wave or Buzz, obviously. And now they are plotting a knockoff of Facebook: how 2009!

We are headed for a post-search web, where search will become something we do less and less. Our social networks will be the source of what we want to know about, rather than Google’s search algorithms. They have got to make that world a reality, instead of acting like it will never happen, or they will be dinosaur dust.

Stowe Boyd, 10 Minute Sprint From 140 Character Conference

Abundance economics means that we won’t rely on search: search is based on scarcity.

Imagine that all critical information is available, publicly, and the most important breaking news is a few seconds (at most) away. In this world the problem won’t be finding what you want, but minimizing the torrent so that you have a small number of things to look at.

This is as true inside of a 1000 person company as in the open web.

Increasingly, we will switch to a social connection mode to filter and find for us. Our networks will become engines of meaning, as Bruce Sterling said.

Everything we want to find has been found, and will find us through our social connections. Like head colds and happiness.

h/t @suprasphere