Social Search - New and improved for 2007
Four new sites will help define how we search the Internet in the upcoming year. Jookster, Yoono, Gravee and Otavo are all new community based search engines that use people to define the best results, and to share them with others. They are kind of like MySpace and Digg with a good search feature.
I think people forget that ultimately, the Internet is millions of people looking for stuff to either make their lives better or to entertain themselves. These four new sites help foster this. Google, Yahoo!, and the other search engines are fine for static searching, but do not really get people together and harness the collective knowledge off all of the people on the Web. These four new sites are trying to do that. Do we need four sites with names that do not mean anything, and are hard to pronounce? Most likely not. One of the them will prevail much like Google did to the benefit of almost everyone. Google changed how we use the Internet. One of these will do the same someday.
The Internet is useless without people. We will see in 2007 how useful the Internet becomes.
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Comments (2 comments)
Although the concept is intriguing the sustainability is limited. There is a selection bias involved in who participates in these web sites. It will typically be a small set of individuals, with strong preference for a particular topic. The problem with this is that the type of responses given, particularly for “quests” that have a political, economic or social flavor, will be biased in the direction of the respondent. Second, there are costs involved with monitoring and responding to “quests.” The costs may be outweighed by “helping” another in their “quest,” but in the long-term that type of warm and fuzzy satisfaction will dissipate, particularly if the giver does not feel his/her efforts are reciprocated. Finally, saying you are on a “quest” is dork-speak, and nobody likes a dork.
Gavin / December 21st, 2006, 2:51 pm / #
[…] I had mentioned Otavo in a previous posting as one of the next disruptors of Internet search. That may be a little misleading since Otavo is not really a search engine. At least not in the way we are accustomed to. It is actually a community of seekers, “questers” or whatever you want to call people looking for stuff online. Sounds like fun, but if you are really in a hurry when looking for a pumpkin pie recipe, you may want to go somewhere else. […]
Mateosquared’s iSearch » Otavo - Stop searching and start questing / December 22nd, 2006, 3:07 am / #
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