When Search borrows from your “friend list”

Facebook is a closed garden with one-way doors.

This means that data comes in, but it’s not coming out –yet. I predict that Facebook will continue to have mass user adoption at the consumer level, when they get smart, they’ll use their online identity system as a widget, and it will be what Microsoft Passport never was.

In this following post from Inside Facebook, they suggests that Google is not relevant in Facebook, Facebook has it’s own news and feed ranking indexes and systems. Facebook has it’s own search tool, it’s own social network to find information.

[Future information finding systems will evolve to use data from your social network, yielding results based upon your trusted peers]

If search evolves, will we rely on personal social network features (what do my friends think and recommend) over search? Will we evolve to smaller network based searches? In many ways, this is what Mahalo was trying to overcome, the problem with that is that I don’t know (and therefore don’t trust) the editors creating the Mahalo data. This is why so many thought leaders are already thinking about their Facebook strategy.

Although Google continues to evolve it’s AI to build better search tools, trust continues to be the leading factor in finding information, that’s why I think that Google search results have much to be desired: popular is not the same as correct.

The future of search will contain human elements in addition to algorithms.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 7:47 am and is filed under Search Strategy, Social Media Measurement, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.