How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4259135.html


One venture capitalist thinks that, with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Second Life, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. This pits decentralized search against social networks. One can also perhaps predict whether or not this transition will occur using game theory like in class.

The creation of online communities of people sharing content (youtube, flickr, facebook...etc) forms large clusters of web pages where the users are not just consumers, as they are when they use search engines, but instead are generating- content as well. This is interesting because according to the article, people are more likely to want to find information through one of their social networks than through an algorithm based search like google, because "after all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right? "

wrong. most people are stupid. the people at google are not.

More than just the "people at Google" being smart, the fact that people get their information from social networks has adverse effects to our society in general because, as previously put, users are GENERATING content at the same time they are absorbing it.

One example: Journalism (print especially) is a sort of dying industry. With the rise of blogs (on which people can post info. about news instantaneously), people do not even want to wait around until the next morning to receive last night's news with thorough analysis. Many people are relying on the blogosphere to instantaneously get them the news that interests them. If something big happens, twitter users and bloggers have known about and published stories about it much before the NYT's article comes out the next morning. Not only is this bad because information is coming from biased, unprofessional sources that probably don't know enough about the issue, but it also sets off information cascades that many times lead many people to the wrong conclusion.

I think that blogs are going to be the default way in which people get news stories in the near future, but I cannot see people relying on their social networks for searches not related to news stories, because the chances of someone posting about whatever topic you are searching is going to be pretty small in most cases. Google is just too easy to use for a lot of things that people are not going to give it up for a long time.

"after all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right? "
while this is true, I only have so many friends with limited information and even though I usually trust them I still trust the world-renown experts more (none of whom are my facebook friends).
While yes, social networks may call my attention towards interesting news or videos (such as this discussion board) but most of the time when I am looking for something specific I go to google.

patrickmccoy wrote:I think that blogs are going to be the default way in which people get news stories in the near future, but I cannot see people relying on their social networks for searches not related to news stories, because the chances of someone posting about whatever topic you are searching is going to be pretty small in most cases. Google is just too easy to use for a lot of things that people are not going to give it up for a long time.

I don't think blogs will be the default way for people to get news stories. Personally I find very little worthwhile reporting from bloggers. Bloggers seem to be focused a lot more on opinion and a lot less on actual facts-and-figures reporting. I would rather look at the raw data and draw my own conclusions than view everything through someone else's lens.

In the same way, I will continue to prefer to search Google rather than rely on social networks, if only for the simple fact that Google implicitly takes millions of peoples' preferences into account and not just the small sample that is my friends. And my friends are likely to have similar biases and opinions to each other - I'd rather get aggregate information and rely on the wisdom of the crowds.