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.

2 March 2011 Permalink

Meaning Is The New Search, One More Time

The gray zone of SEO has been brought into high relief by David Segal’s exposé of JC Penney’s link scheme, apparently managed by SearchDex.

David Segal, Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets

When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.

And the relationship between paid advertising and black hat link spamming?

Here’s another hypothesis, this one for the conspiracy-minded. Last year, Advertising Age obtained a Google document that listed some of its largest advertisers, including AT&T, eBay and yes, J. C. Penney. The company, this document said, spent $2.46 million a month on paid Google search ads — the kind you see next to organic results.

Is it possible that Google was willing to countenance an extensive black-hat campaign because it helped one of its larger advertisers? It’s the sort of question that European Union officials are now studying in an investigation of possible antitrust abuses by Google.

This is a great negative example making the case for social search. It will certainly prove possible to spam social networks, but it will also prove to be much more easy to discover and delete such spam.

We’ve moved out of scarcity-based search, where there were few results for searches. In a time of super-abundant information, the problem becomes ‘who do you want filtering for you?’ Google’s foundational method is counting incoming links, weighted by a reputation, derived again on incoming links. From this it derives a position in search results.

But in an era where we can connect directly to others in social networks, we can rely directly on our connections to filter the immense web, so meaning is the new search:

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.

13 February 2011 6 Permalink

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.

12 January 2011 8 Permalink

A Note On Tumblr Tags and Search

Tumblr — the platform this blog is hosted on — has so-so search capabilities. Often Tumblr’s built in search fails to find things in my blog that I know are there. So I often resport to using Google’s site search. For example, if I were looking for references to McLuhan, I might type this in my browser search box:

mcluhan site:www.stoweboyd.com

I haven’t integrated this into my template because the search results aren’t integrated.

I use a lot of tags, so it is often faster to simply use the Tumble URL for tags:

www.stoweboyd.com/tagged/mcluhan

www.stoweboyd.com/tagged/social_cognition

Note that the ‘_’ underbar replaces spaces in tags.

12 November 2010 4 Permalink

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.

14 August 2010 2 Permalink

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

8 August 2010 8 Permalink

Jeremie Miller and Wikia Search

Jeremie Miller dropped me an email yesterday, letting me know he had looked for me while visiting 625 2nd Street in San Francisco. He was there meeting other folks with offices in the building. I asked what he was up to, and he responded that he is working with Jimmy Wales and the folks at Wikia on a new open source search platform:

[from Jabber Founder Jeremie Miller Joins Forces with Jimmy Wales to Build Open Search Platform]

Miller to spearhead development of a new search platform combining human intelligence with open protocols.

San Mateo, Calif. (PRWEB via PRWebDirect) May 1, 2007 — Wikia, Inc. (www.wikia.com) the leading provider of community resources for building and organizing free content on every topic, today announced that Jabber founder Jeremie Miller has joined forces with Wikia founder Jimmy Wales to collaborate on building a new search platform founded on open-source search protocols and human collaboration.

PRWeb Press Release Newswire v8

Miller is widely recognized as the inventor of Jabber, an open instant messaging community and the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), which is an open protocol that allows instant messaging platforms to interoperate and users to communicate freely and safely. Building on the same principles, Miller hopes to combine the transparency and power of an open protocol with the efficacy of a user-editable search experience.

“The Internet and Web are founded on completely open principles, I’ve championed this philosophy for instant messaging and believe that the awesome power of search should be based on the same fundamental rules,” said Jeremie Miller. “The power of a simple protocol is that it enables networks of resources to collaborate openly, to be constructive instead of competitive. I’m eager to work with Jimmy and empower everyone in the search industry with a transparent collaborative open protocol, from researchers, to developers, vertical search startups, and most importantly, end users.”

The conversation is evolving at Wikia’s search.wikia.com (www.search.wikia.com) community wiki, through which Wikia is funding and supporting the development of something radically new. Together Miller and Wales aim to build a new economy for Internet search that relies on absolute transparency, collaboration, and human intelligence to complement search algorithms.

Wow. How did I miss that?

I plan to ask Jeremie to join me in an upcoming episode of /Talkshow to tell us all more about it.

7 June 2007 Permalink

Update!! /Talkshow: Tony Conrad of Sphere at 11am 7 8 June

Update: I goofed on dates. Turns out I asked Tony to be on the show tomorrow, 8 June, at 11am PT. So that’s when it will be.

I have Tony Conrad lined up as a guest for today’s tomorrow’s /Talkshow. Tony is founder and CEO of Sphere, a blog search technology. Tonay and I will be talking about Sphere and the future of search.

7 June 2007 Permalink

Steve Rubel on Yahoo Gives Up On Search

Steve Rubel has a great response to Yahoo’s statements about not being able to catch Google on search:

[Micro Persuasion: Yahoo Cedes Search to Google and So Do I]

That’s it, I am no longer using Yahoo Search. I have no interest in using a product that the company doesn’t aspire to make best of breed. If search is no longer hip to Yahoo, then Yahoo Search is no longer hip with me. As much as I am a fan of Yahoo on the whole, I would rather stick with a search platform that is run by a company that’s always striving to be number one, e.g. Google. (BTW, Microsoft would rather die than say they are ceding search to Google. That’s a big difference between the two companies.)

And the answer to his question — if they aren’t search, then what are they? — I think that’s obvious from the companies they are buying: they are trying to develop leadership in social architecture/media, based on melding Flickr, Yahoo Groups, etc., with new entertainment media stuff, and they have hopes they will be the market leader. (Witness Susan Mernitt’s new gig at Yahoo Personals.) But that’s goiing to be an equally competitive arena.

24 January 2006 Permalink