Mahalo Sideswiped By Google Search Tweaks

Kit Eaton, iFive: Google Tweak Hits Mahalo, Malware Android Apps, Yahoo Leaving Japan, Amazon Threatens Cal., Twitter Axes Apple Parody | Fast Company

Google adjusted its search algorithm last week to suppress content mills and promote quality web writing—and now, in direct response, Mahalo (which has reinvented itself as a “human powered search engine” but is essentially a content factory) has reduced its staff by 10% because of a “significant dip in … traffic and revenue.” 

Google is bailing with a shot glass as the towering waves of piss poor content threaten to swamp search. Meanwhile, our reliance on social connection as the root of meaning grows:

Stowe Boyd, Meaning Is The New Search

We will find everything through social relationships: what washing machine to buy, or the best Thai restaurant in Beacon NY, or the company that makes the horizontal corduroys. people that care about these issues, and to who we matter, will share meaning with us: they have beliefs that they can justify, also called knowledge.

Google is only the echo of our linking behavior, a second-order derivative of our combined gestures. But generally, we would be happier with fewer results from trusted sources, and the rise of social tools makes that almost as fast as Google search.

Google must plan to adapt to the social revolution or fall into the spam darkness.

Meaning Is The New Search

As it becomes harder and harder for Google to avoid the spam sites, search becomes a less helpful way to find answers. Paul Kedrosky says that curation is the answer, and always has been.

Paul Kedrosky, Curation is the New Search is the New Curation

Any algorithm can be gamed; it’s only a matter of time. The Google algorithm is now well and thoroughly gamed, as I first wrote about late last year, and as now become an entire genre of web writing, and that has grown to include my friend Vivek Wadhwa’s smart piece on TechCrunch not long ago. Google has, they argue, lost its mojo — which is true, but it’s more interesting and complicated than that.

What has happened is that Google’s ranking algorithm, like any trading algorithm, has lost its alpha. It no longer has lists to draw and, on its own, it no longer generates the same outperformance — in part because it is, for practical purposes, reverse-engineered, well-understood and operating in an adaptive content landscape. Search results in many categories are now honey pots embedded in ruined landscapes — traps for the unwary. It has turned search back into something like it was in the dying days of first-generation algorithmic search, like Excite and Altavista: results so polluted by spam that you often started looking at results only on the second or third page — the first page was a smoking hulk of algo-optimized awfulness.

There are two things that can happen now. (Okay, three. We could stop search, which won’t happen.). We could get better algorithms, which is happening to some degree, with search engines like Blekko and others. Or, we could head back to curation, which is what I see happening, and watch new algos emerge on top of that next-gen curation again. Think of Twitter as a new stab at curation, but there are plenty of other examples.

Yes, that sounds mad. If we couldn’t index 100,000 websites in 1996 by hand, how do we propose to do 234-million by hand today?

The answer, of course, is that we won’t — do them all by hand, that is. Instead, the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation — not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) — and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.). We are going to increasingly see nichey services that sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical Q&A sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges’ Library of Babylon. The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will continue, over and over.

In short, curation is the new search. It’s also the old search. And it’s happening again, and again.

I take a different view, which is that meaning is the new search:

10 Minute Sprint From 140 Characters Conference: Social Business

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.

We will find everything through social relationships: what washing machine to buy, or the best Thai restaurant in Beacon NY, or the company that makes the horizontal corduroys. people that care about these issues, and to who we matter, will share meaning with us: they have beliefs that they can justify, also called knowledge.

Google is only the echo of our linking behavior, a second-order derivative of our combined gestures. But generally, we would be happier with fewer results from trusted sources, and the rise of social tools makes that almost as fast as Google search.

Google must plan to adapt to the social revolution or fall into the spam darkness.

On Quora: What are the hottest iPad or tablet application startups?

My answer:

Flipboard is perhaps the defining iPad app of the present, and in their niche — the social magazine — they command the visionary high ground. There will be a huge competition for that space, and a wide variety of competitors, including traditional publishers like NYTimes, Wired, etc., crossovers like Branson’s Project magazine, and many, many upstarts like Flipboard. 

I expect that Twitter’s ambitions in making its own client software suggests they will — sooner or later — take a run at the social magazine niche, once the potential is really obvious. Perhaps an acquisition of Flipboard? Facebook could also build a tablet format social magazine, and drowning in cash, why wouldn’t they? 

Google should wade in immediately, since meaning is the new search: we will rely on our social connections to deliver meaningful insights to us instead of relying on search engines’ indexing to find clues. But Google’s social deafness has hampered them for years, so they will likely dither until the metaphor of social magazine has been well-established, and then they will build a sketchy knock-off using three people’s 20% time, wait a few months and shut it down, and then acquire two social magazine start-ups for $50M, wait two years and then shut them down. Then one of the founders of one of those start-ups will build a great social magazine product, which will be acquired by AOL.

Eric Schmidt Confirms Google Is Off Track

Last week it was Peter Norvig admitting that Google has missed the opening rounds of the battle for the social web (see Google’s Biggest Mistake: The Rise Of The Social (Post Search) Web), and this week his boss confirms that Google is still off in algorithm land instead of understanding the social dimension of the web:

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.: Google and the Search for the Future

The day is coming when the Google search box—and the activity known as Googling—no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? “We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. “I mean that in a positive way. We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.”

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know. “The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically,” Mr. Schmidt says.

The idea that machines will tell us what to do next is chilling, rather than liberating. Yes, we will use social tools that harness the millions of activities of our social circles and scenes, but our affiliation with others is where we will find meaning, not some functional result served up by Google or Facebook or Twitter.

Meaning is the new search.

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

The Naming Of Things: Social Business

I guess the Dachis folks are getting some push back on the use of the ‘social business’ and ‘social business design’ handles to characterize the impacts of social tools on business.

[via Defining Social Business Design: Style vs. Substance by Peter Kim]

For the most part, people understand that we’re talking about what’s on the horizon for business. However, most detractors seem to take issue with the style of the idea’s communication rather than its substance. Some say they don’t understand. I’ll take that at face value and suggest they try harder. Others ask why simpler words weren’t used. Well, as a certain bald-headed guru told me, “words matter.”

Some new terms take a lot of persuading before they become lodged in the zeitgeist, like Web 2.0 and social tools, in the past ten years. But, now, on balance, we can see that these ideas have helped to characterize what is going on: to clarify, not to confuse.

Many people are naturally reluctant to adopt what might just be specious terms, especially after being subjected to ‘knowledge management’ projects, or asked to ‘think out of the box’ at company offsites, or being barraged with market speak by a word-happy advertising culture.

But I believe that words, and even more importantly, metaphors, matter. How we choose to name things makes a difference.

Unlike Peter Kim and his associates at Dachis, I might have been more metaphorical and less riveted down in my prose for a social business description than Peter was in his post today, and in the earlier group post (see Social Business Design). Of course, they are advancing a more complex picture — social business design, and its moving parts — while I am simply sketching out the anthropology of the thing.

Since I am doing a ten minute sprint presentation on social business at tomorrow’s 140 Character conference, here’s my handwave.

Social Business

‘Social Business’ denotes businesses organized around social ties and the use of social technologies to support them.

This is intended to represent a break between companies (in general) organized prior to the rise of the social web.

Leaving aside any implied methods for designing, building, or even managing such organizations, I offer a few one-liners to try to capture the essential elements of these organizations. I don’t want to undercut my 10 minutes of glory, so here’s a few teasers:

• the individual is the new group
• business is a village, not an army
• small talk is big again
• meaning is the new search
• time is the new space
• flow is the new center