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Recommendations & Discovery are the New Search

Recommendations and discovery are becoming more and more important - to the internet in general, but also specifically as a complement, supplement, and (gasp!) replacement to core search activities.

The big question I’m wondering is how long it will be before a “Search” box appears on the StumbleUpon home page - leveraging their human derived index to allow for narrowly focused, highly relevant stumbling.

In one sense, the rise of “R&D” can be seen as a response to Google’s dominance - services like StumbleUpon, Medium, and so on offer entrepreneurs and investors a way around Google to influence people’s web-usage patterns.

In another sense, however, the evolution of R&D is a natural consequence of technology’s march. R&D services are fundamentally search engines: they just use a different class of algorithm (clickstream correlation), and accept queries in a less-structured fashion. Effectively, R&D services are another point in the spectrum of human vs. algorithmic search options: Google pins down one end, while Mahalo, ChaCha, and even Yahoo! Answers compete at the other. StumbleUpon and their ilk exist in the center blending the human element (clickstreams) with the machine (automated aggregation and analysis).

Implications

Better “Next Gen” Search: Combining the masses of human derived data available to services like StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us with powerful algorithmic analysis has the potential to create the next iteration of search. It drives me crazy, for instance, that Yahoo! hasn’t leveraged the human-powered keyword index of del.icio.us to improve their core search offering.

New SEO Strategies: The focus of SEO will shift even more from page-optimization/link volume to social strength & credibility (source credibility for back-links) - i.e.: getting linked-to from influential blogs (and other sites) will continue to grow in importance, volume link-buys will taper-off.

Power Seeders: SEO will also increasingly include the dual concepts of key members and power seeders, as pioneered on Digg. Reaching the opinion leaders and heavily weighted profiles on social ranking sites has already become a cottage industry; expect it to grow. Right now, our culture’s memetic power seeders are people like Oprah Winfrey - old media bastions of influence. Expect the new importance of R&D to over time turn this upside down and create a new population of bottom-up net-centric influencers.

Update: Power Seeder Marketing in practice, as covered on Mashable.

In Summary

There’s lots of talk about “Next Gen Search” - in the form of PowerSet (natural language), Mahalo, etc. Generally speaking, I think “next gen” is a misnomer - the first gen isn’t done as the previously mentioned human-to-algorithm spectrum is still being filled out. Even technologies like PowerSet’s natural language search, IMHO, aren’t game changers - they’re just a different means of submitting a query to an index which lies on the same human-to-algorithm spectrum as every other index.

That being said, the ability of search to intelligently return results from those indexes has plenty of room for improvement; my position is that the next leap quality will be driven by a blend of social and traditional algorithmic technologies.

calacanis, chacha, delicious, google, mahalo, medium, search, stumbleupon yahoo

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