FLIRTing with the Crowds

Some buzz has recently been generated around Jimmy Wales’s apparent move to search engine business with Wikia Search. While it has been argued that, especially with the reported gamings of Digg and similar services, introducing a human element to online search is sure to introduce also attempts to artificially work the system, others assert that such gaming is already at play with also traditional search engines and the wiki-style approach would help to make such attempts more transparent and traceable. Also, the absence of me-focus in search engine participation raises doubts of what would be the motivation for the crowds to participate in largely anonymous search engine function where the 15-megabytes of fame doesn’t apply.

At same time, however, a new form of searching strongly related to the wiki-approach has already begun to establish itself alongside traditional search. That is, searching for content by tags on sites that serve specific kind of content. This is made possible by more and more companies adopting the tagging and folksonomy ideology of categorizing content. The approach works best when the searcher already knows in what format the desired content is needed. For example, if I want to search for presentations on building social applications on the web, my first alternative is not Google, but slideshare.net. If I need info on where people go to for brainstorming techniques, I use del.icio.us first, not Google. Same naturally goes for videos (YouTube), images (Flickr), etc. Of course I can use Google afterwards for further exploration, but it is not anymore the de facto standard. Furthermore, I notice using Google on many occasions to search for content which is already in some way familiar to me (e.g. an article whose title I remember) and simply want to obtain the specific URL it resides in. With more explorative goals, I use various format-specific (technorati for blogs, etc.) channels laterally.

In my opinion, this kind of search definitely complements, rather than challenges algorithm-based search engines, such as Google’s and Yahoo’s. I believe that while the tag-related search on specific content formats will become stronger, algorithms will continue to do a good job in certain types of searches and both can and will co-exist in the future.