“If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize.”
Tech Crunch’s Duncan Riley
I can probably find it in an email, a presentation… though it was probably verbal… but since 2005 when we built the first product in the Mojo Supreme assortment of goodies, the MetaMojo.com search engine, I figured it was a matter of time before Google would do two things:
- personalization
- socialization
They did the personalization part in 2006 when they launched Coop. I covered it plenty here.
They did the second part just now: Google is running an experiment that can “influence [the] search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results.”
Think Google meets Digg.
This was one of the many bells and whistles we looked at adding, but ultimately didn’t because the strain on our index’s database would slow down the speed of the product, which is more important frankly initially than the ability for users to vote for results on the fly (we can change the order on the back end, however, seamlessly).
There’s a reason why we devote (and have devoted since January 2006 when I left my old company) 99% of our resources on WatchMojo.com and not MetaMojo.com. MetaMojo.com has two products: a vertical best of breed search engine, and a video meta search. The video meta search is actually getting more and more popular… But the vertical search’s benefits are over time easily duplicated by someone like Google, and we knew that.
The reason is that as the world’s largest computer with the largest distribution in the world and the best monetization engine in the world (see a trend), Google can overnight add features that would take years and millions in capital to scale by a startup.
For the record, I still believe in vertical search, niche players etc., but search is NOT really in the first inning. In some ways, it is, yes… but I do not see anyone knocking off Google (not saying anything new there, admittedly, as they have 66% of search ad revenue and query market share).
Of course, I think mass market search players like Google will launch things and startups can execute it far better, but unlike the Coop product that is easy for startups to do (if you knew that our total budget for MetaMojo.com was since 2005 you’d think we were magicians and could turn water into wine), what they did today is a bit more tricky (the pressure on their database of results, which is already in the billions of sites, is staggering)… but for Google - the world’s largest and strongest online computer - it’s a simple add-on.
Technologically notwithstanding, I am more surprised that they did this, because Google has long been all about the algorithm, and by allowing mortal men (and women) to change the order of results, then they are taking a new direction.
Of course, with all major companies, the individual first steps they take is somewhat moot, it’s the follow up and execution that is key…
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November 29th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
I wonder if they will use people’s customizations to help tweak their algorithm.
November 29th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
I think they will probably want to first make sure that spammers don’t boost up commercial-heavy results.
since google’s organic results tend to be content oriented and their paid ads are commercial, that is the main risk… but over time, if enough people do vote, they might see if they should.
I personally doubt that most Google users will care, this is a nice tool to have, but a need to have, and most “real” people (not early adopters, bloggers, journalists, marketers) won’t really notice.