TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

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).