Will a people’s collective be able to beat Google at the search game?
That’s the proverbial $64,000 question, and venture investors are trying to answer that by funding start-ups such as Wink, that plans to go live perhaps as soon as Thursday, according to Silicon Valley sources. The company has been in a limited beta since October, and today conducted a major update to its infrastructure and interface, according to their blog.
Wink is a search engine that integrates tag results from multiple sources such as del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo MyWeb (and we’re adding more). As more services incorporate tags and user input, new pages are added to the Wink index and ranked using our TagRank technology to deliver the best results.
Wink is backed by some serious heavy weights: Scott Kurnit of About.com; Ron Conway; Reid Hoffman, Marc Andressen along with Venky Harinarayan (of Cambrian ventures) and David Sze (of Greylock).
Wink is not alone in taking on Google. Of course, there are others like Activeweave, Jookster, Kaboodle, and Rollyo which are taking “human cycles” and trying to come-up with better results than Google.
Yahoo’s MyWeb effort, so eloquently detailed by Erick Schonfeld in Business 2.0, and its recent acquisition of Del.icio.us are part of this “people versus Google” movement.
I am not so optimistic about this trend, because I have not seen the mainstreams get interested in the bookmarking and tagging as yet. Believers can take comfort in the fact, that it is early days, but I am not so sure. I think it needs a behavioral change on part of “searchers” who have become accustomed to simply typing their queries and then trying to figure out where to go. Sort of like bad cell phone coverage : we go used to it.
Of course, conspiracy theorist like me often wonders, what if search not only became good, but great and accurate. A lot of “spare page views” generated by hit-and-miss model of today can drastically reduce page views, and advertising opportunities. Of course that would be horrible for Google….
Back to Wink…. I am going to test out their offering once they go live, and update the post. You can of course contribute your thoughts.
one observation — while they may (or may not) take on Google they seem to earn some bucks out via Google’s Adsense. 🙂
Explicit human endorsement of sites will definitely lead to better results than PageRank based on link popularity.
This has already been proven for years with subscription search services in the library world. For example, LexisNexis, Ovid, NLM PubMed all include citation content that has been “tagged” with terms by content experts. This leads to very high quality, precise search.
In the end though, Google can just add this as an additional layer to their search algorithms.
Excellent post Om as usual – a few comments:
1. The hardest thing to create in today’s world is a new brand. Google successfully created a top 10 brand. That will be hard to replicate.
2. As you point out, Google tapped into current user behavior. All of these other search engines are attempting to alter user behavior – which is much, much harder to do.
3. Finally, there has been such a flood of these companies, all fairly undifferentiated, that it will be very tough for them to garner significant public attention. This is a little bit back to the brand issue, but, more broadly, they will have a hard time driving the traffic. That means spending more on marketing (sound familiar) or becoming a technology provider. I believe most of these web 2.0 companies will give up on becoming a major consumer brand and start thinking about the technology provider route.
If we look at the path of a typical web 2.0 startup at this point, I believe they will follow the web 1.0 model:
– Attempt to become a consumer brand
– Attempt to partner with established consumer brands as a content or technology provider
– Become a pure technology service play
– Become an auction site for Aeron Chairs
These little Web 2.0 companies are also quickly moving to take in large amounts of VC money without any clear business models other than acquisition – sounds to me like 2000 all over again.
INHO Wink has 3 disadvantages:
a) Ranking pages is a very subjective matter – what one finds as relevant info, others might find irrelevant.
b) It’s almost impossible to get different people to tag the same page with the same tags, even if there are a fixed set of tagging words.
c) Most people won’t start work as librarians and index web pages…
But don’t get me wrong, I’m very much in favor of more accurate searches!
Thanks for bringing this subject up Om. As the founder of Seekum this subject area interests me very much. As Xen pointed out what one finds interesting others may not, but I believe that things like tag density, and user votes will overcome this issues as more people are involved. I agree that not everyone is going to be tagging pages, or especially bookmarking pages in the sense that Wink needs them to be bookmarked. Wink needs users to bookmark practically every page they go to. To me I am still stuck with a “Favorites” mentality sugesting that I only bookmark sites that I would go back to or even worse really like compared to similar pages. Thats why when building Seekum we use an up down philosophy. The page is either relevant to a search or not. I’m not sure if these other more complex algorithms will help search results in the end. I think users in mass just by voting will be able to though.
The tagging revolution doesn’t require a search engine — check out the StumbleUpon extension for Firefox
I’ve written a few lines on tagging here . in short, I think way too many products are starting to rely on ‘people power’. if we agreed, soon, we’d all be working for ‘web 2.0’, instead of ‘it’ working for us.
having said that, I do like the fact that wink (1) allows users to rank a given item in a result set and (2) makes grouping+saving+sharing of a result set. however, these are merely features that google & yahoo! can add (are adding?) … no need to start a company around it.
I think we’re already seeing people power taking on Google: slowly and surely Wikipedia is rising to become the world’s no. 1 information source
In 2007 we find out that two of these engines are really gaining market share and somewhere in Redmond a bald old man is seen swearing at his employees “I am going to fucking KILL….” and tossing chairs at them.
“INHO Wink has 3 disadvantages:”
Add a fourth: Marc Andressen, the kiss of death to any venture. 🙂
Well, we can look back at search history and remember people were saying the same things back then.
“Nothing can replace Altavista. It rocks!”
“Nothing can replace Yahoo! It rocks!”
“Nothing can replace Google. It rocks!”
It’s likely that something will replace Google, but it’s going to be stealth like Google was (and, well, Yahoo! as well). For all we know, there are two kids working in a garage right now that we just don’t know about, who are creating the Google competitor.
Yeesh – any service that introduces itself with the word “tagosphere” is clearly making a product for geeks, not for mass consumption.
People will tag and use the social bookmarking sites as soon as they are integrated into the browser and people don’t realize they are doing it. Flock is important.
I’m greatly interested in the concept, however I think we’re going to find only geek/web 2.0 use of Wink, and that means it’s only going to fill a small niche. For this to be succesful(useful), it needs to be appealing to the mainstream.
We’ve looked a lot at tagging and community-driven search/ranking at blinkx and while we still might support it more explicitly in the future, the trials we have done thus far appear to suffer from a level of what I call ‘Bay Area bias’. The problem (as you identify, Om) is that only certain types of people are interested in cataloguing the web and bookmarking/ranking pages within it, so those people have a massively disproportionate effect on things … if you look at the world through spectacles similar to those worn by these trend-setters, everyone’s happy, but if you don’t, it can be difficult to find the right thing.
Having said all of that, Google’s early relevance success was essentially down to analysis of linking affected by webmasters across the internet — hardly a demographically diverse group, after all — and that worked really quite well. So-oo, look forward to seeing what what Wink can show us.
Incidently, Ramesh Jain has some interesting views on this sort of thing, by the way: http://ngs.ics.uci.edu/blog/?p=402
“For this to be succesful(useful), it needs to be appealing to the mainstream.”
Del.icio.us was not useful/appealing to the mainstream, yet it was successful in the sense that Yahoo paid money to acquire it. Isn’t that want Wink is after?
Isnt this how Yahoo used to work in the beginning anyways?
âNothing can replace Altavista. It rocks!â?
âNothing can replace Yahoo! It rocks!â?
âNothing can replace Google. It rocks!â?
this gag is cool 😀
Hmm, better look up “sanguine”.
rick teach,…, you can be my copy editor any time. thank you, correction made. appreciate the eagle eyes. resolution for 2006… less calvados, more time rereading/rethinking. thanks again
Wouldn’t it be silly to assume Google don’t track user behaviour in some form? One one would be to see which links on a result page get the most hits for each keyword combination.
Michael Tanne chiming in. Thanks Om – you started an interesting discussion going and there are definitely some good questions raised.
It’s fair to point out that user behavior isn’t easily changed. A place in someone’s busy day is earned by delivering value. Years of experience have shown that users want to type a simple search and get the results they want yet many people use multiple sources for different needs. I know many people who did without Technorati for years – they didn’t think anyone was saying anything worthwhile in blogs – but now can’t live without it. If users find what they’re looking for at Wink a few times, we hope they’ll use Wink as one of their sources.
By integrating analysis of user input – and tags/bookmarks are just one method, albeit a growing phenomenon – with other relevance techniques we tease out the best results we can find. Both Xen and Michael have correctly pointed out you have to do much more than do a string compare across tags and hope that people use the same tag terms. There is also a distinction between people bookmarking sites they want to keep around and rating results as a passing observation. There are many other factors we try to consider. People have generally been posting that they like the results they are finding so far.
About people power – it has already become cliche, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. When memes travel at the speed of blogs, an idea can become wired, then tired then expired before the engineers have even checked in their code into subversion. Dan Bricklin spoke of the Cornucopia of the Commons http://www.bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm on Aug 7, 2000. just because too many “Web 2.0 companies” have launched (It’s even hard to type that phrase, it’s so cliche already) doesn’t mean that Dan was wrong, or that user participation isn’t really happening. There are many examples of applications (cddb, eventful, wikipedia) where the enthusiastic 5% provides most of the information – and receive some benefit that satisfies them, even if it’s just the satisfaction of helping, or perhaps some recognition, and the 95% enjoy the results of their efforts.
On starting companies – that’s a whole different post. Are there too many starting now? Probably. Are there similarities to 1999? You bet, we were there – I was a founder of AdForce and the others on the team were at Inktomi and Epinions. A few big differences – there is a vibrant and I believe real underlying delivery of value on the Web that is expressed through the marketplaces of AdWords and Overture, et al; those of us who’ve been through it before are more cautious, but know that every new venture is a risk; the cost of doing business on a dollar per useful bit basis have been cut by a factor of 30 due to the cost/performance of hardware and the productivity of open source according to Joe Kraus http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2005/06/its_a_great_tim.html; and in today’s world a company faces better odds taking their product straight to the users than attempting to cut an OEM technology deal. Most bus dev people I know currently favor real market success over technology and a deal structure. So I’d still advise entrepreneurs with user-oriented breakthroughs to take it to the people before taking it to the bus dev folks.
Nothing wrong with starting with the geeks – they’ve been there at the beginning of almost every new thing. We may refer to the “Tagosphere” now, but that text is editable as the market evolves. (No doubt that word will be cliche by the time I hit “submit” – I will note that Google reports just 173 pages with the term at this moment) We’re comfortable with the idea that this may be more attractive to early adopters at first. Over time the subject matter that is adequately tagged will expand and we will try to be ready for those markets. If that happens it will be because we have done our job making the service useful.
The real test is if people like our results and honor us with a few moments of their attention. If they give is that, we will do everything in our power to deliver something of value.
Oh, and I believe the market has shown that delivering more value to the user should never be sacrificed – so we shouldn’t worry that people will find their results too fast so there won’t be enough page views to show ads on. Things that deliver value grow.
(and we don’t own any Aeron chairs 🙂
Thanks for giving Wink a chance to do something interesting.
Wikipedia rocks and it’s the only challenge to Google…
Michael – since I was the one raining on your parade, I feel it is only fair to thank you for such a great and thoughtful response. Clearly, you’ve got your head on straight and have a humilty which I sometimes find lacking in SV companies. And I’m glad to hear you don’t have the Aeron chairs!
Here’s my key issue with Wink so far: I can’t figure out what to use it for. Meaning, I’m not sure it’s complete, and I’m not sure I trust the results. Therefore I, as an ordinary consumer of search, would go back to Google.
Om,
You have started a great conversation regarding People Power vs Google. And the remarks from Michael Tanne are very poignant. It sounds like they have a great vision for offering better search results. I wanted to offer my perspective and discuss how Clipmarks is trying to tackle this in a different way.
Your question “Will a people’s collective be able to beat Google at the search game?” as well as a recent blog post by Patricia Seybold about the need to “make sense out of what’s going on and what’s out there to discover” speak to the heart of the collective innovation that has been termed web 2.0. They also directly address the purpose of Clipmarks. In our opinion, the key to offering meaningfully better results will necessitate offering a wholly different kind of results. Whether you are referring to bookmarks or search engines, links to web pages are not enough. There is too much guess work and too much clicking back and forth before you find what you’re looking for. I just can’t imagine how that will ever not be the case.
So the question is, what would these ‘different’ results offer that make them meaningfully better? In my opinion, instead of solely offering links to web pages, they would connect people with 1) specific information they are looking for; and 2) the online sources of that information; and 3) other people who share a common passion and interest in a topic. To create this platform, we are offering people a tool that lets them easily clip and tag specific content they find within the web pages they visit. This content plus a link to its online source can then be saved as a clipmark.
Like bookmarks, clipmarks can be created solely for private use or for social purposes. The difference, of course, is that with clipmarks, people are able to see the information that has been clipped and then decide whether they want to click the source link to find more information. As a result, people are making a more intelligent decision about which links to click on and which sources to visit. If the content that has been clipped does not interest you, then you won’t click the source. However, if the content is compelling, you will want to vist the source to learn more.
We hope that people will visit Clipmarks as both a destination to connect with content and people as well as a relaible point of departure to connect with sources (web pages) about any topic that interests them.
So far we have received some great feedback and suggestions from our members and we’re doing our best to make the Clipmarks experience as good as possible. With that in mind, we’re going to be introducing a number of new features over the next few days, weeks and months (years and decades too hopefully 🙂 ) but the current version certainly illustrates what we’re trying to accomplish.
I hope this has helped add a fresh perspective to the discussion about how to offer people a better experience on the web! Oh, and we don’t have Aeron chairs either, but i sure wish we did 🙂
eric
well, there is a rumor, some people believe that a Chinese search engine will beat google soon or later. because they can hire thousand of people to tagging and searching meaning information through the Internet instead of crawler, and that will be much better than any other algorithm so far.
the brain of thousands of people! that’s the real intelligence, LOL!
I think one characteristic of Google is its ambition. They always try to tackle very difficult problems. And their approach which actually consists in automatically tagging the web is clearly the way forward.
Obviously you get satifactory results by having power users tag the web content as evidence with successes like del.icio.us. In pretty much the same way you used to have satisfactory results by having a group of experts catalog the web (Yahoo! version 1). But the holy grail is do that for all content without forcing people to tag anything.
And this what Google is trying to do. They have just started and experiments like Google Music or Google Movies are showing great promise.
At the end of the day, however, we should remember that Google has an advantage: they can index users’s tag and as they become popular and make them play a more and more important part in their semantic web ranking. They can leverage any ontology. Either way they win!
Interesting. Haven’t tried out Wink yet. Am using StumbleUpon.
I am impressed by the Stumble feature which allows you to ‘stumble upon’ random pages (depending on your choice of interests) ‘tagged’ by others … The firefox extension makes it all the more better.
Wink seems to be a Web2.0 version of StumbleUpon. And SU beats del.icio.us with its quick Like-it-and-don’t-like-it buttons… unlike tags opening in pop-ups. I think I’ll stick to SU, though I will definitely try Wink out…
So, does people power involve startups and acquisitions by heavy-weights (Wink, del.icio.us, etc.) only or does it also include welterweights like SU?
Shrikant
NOTE: I am no way related to SU, I just like the service…
Google certainly needs competition, one more company taking on Google is Previewseek from UK, check
Is previewseek better than google
Regards,
Ajay
I’ve written a 4-part posting on the topic of Yahoo and MSN v. Google. You can see it at blogation.blogspot.com. Part three talks about del.icio.us and Flickr. I’d love to hear comments from folks.
I’m gonna dot this.
Hi All,
Re Web 2.0, if you like rollyo, you might want check out http://www.swicki.com. Would really like to hear what you think about swickis.
Regards,
Jennifer Allen
Eurekster Team
jeniffer you have right
Correct Aspotting 😉
well, there is a rumor, some people believe that a Chinese search engine will beat google soon or later. because they can hire thousand of people to tagging and searching meaning information through the Internet instead of crawler, and that will be much better than any other algorithm so far.
the brain of thousands of people! that’s the real intelligence, LOL!
Wouldn’t it be silly to assume Google don’t track user behaviour in some form? One one would be to see which links on a result page get the most hits for each keyword combination.
Like bookmarks, clipmarks can be created solely for private use or for social purposes. The difference, of course, is that with clipmarks, people are able to see the information that has been clipped and then decide whether they want to click the source link to find more information.
I can’t understand the publicity of and around the search engine google. I think soon or later the power of yahoo comes back.
Thanks for bringing this subject up Om. As the founder of Seekum this subject area interests me very much. As Xen pointed out what one finds interesting others may not, but I believe that things like tag density, and user votes will overcome this issues as more people are involved. I agree that not everyone is going to be tagging pages, or especially bookmarking pages in the sense that Wink needs them to be bookmarked. Wink needs users to bookmark practically every page they go to. To me I am still stuck with a “Favorites” mentality sugesting that I only bookmark sites that I would go back to or even worse really like compared to similar pages
By integrating analysis of user input – and tags/bookmarks are just one method, albeit a growing phenomenon – with other relevance techniques we tease out the best results we can find. Both Xen and Michael have correctly pointed out you have to do much more than do a string compare across tags and hope that people use the same tag terms. There is also a distinction between people bookmarking sites they want to keep around and rating results as a passing observation. There are many other factors we try to consider. People have generally been posting that they like the results they are finding so far.
I hope this too that we get back one day all power from yahoo so that it is not on one way
so i see sometimes that google works not correct with bookmarks and links what can that mean
that can mean they play always different scrips inside so that it change all days
best is to make always sure that you have different ways of looking for searchmachines so which script is the last one
yes you are right andrea we make this here all day
what do you mean how will be the way of power by google in future?
You will see what happened maybe google will get bigger and bigger in difference to other search machines
nice weblog
Like bookmarks, clipmarks can be created solely for private use or for social purposes. The difference, of course, is that with clipmarks, people are able to see the information that has been clipped and then decide whether they want to click the source link to find more information.
sehr schöne Seite 🙂
maik
I assume one of the next bigger steps of google will be a geo-search-engine when google combines the search-engine with google-earth. it might become combined with wlan, gps, umts, blueberry.. think it will be quite an attractive plattform for local stores and restaurants. but i would like to silently point out that google always mines the data they recieve from their customers in order to sell marketing-data.
i read about a project offering geo-bookmarks (with gps), where people can write about the places they actually are and read from people that were there before. like a guestbook.
In 2007 we find out that two of these engines are really gaining market share and somewhere in Redmond a bald old man is seen swearing at his employees “I am going to fucking KILL…” and tossing chairs at them.
By integrating analysis of user input – and tags/bookmarks are just one method, albeit a growing phenomenon – with other relevance techniques we tease out the best results we can find. Both Xen and Michael have correctly pointed out you have to do much more than do a string compare across tags and hope that people use the same tag terms. There is also a distinction between people bookmarking sites they want to keep around and rating results as a passing observation. There are many other factors we try to consider. People have generally been posting that they like the results they are finding so far.
I think a searchengine with human power is much better than having only a machine for the same action. It is fact that machines are more quick and the result also newer and bigger than the selfmade ones, but we know that machines make mistakes. Is it more important to have big and new results or a better index checked by humans. I think this is the better way for searching and indexing the internet.
best is to make always sure that you have different ways of looking for searchmachines so which script is the last one
I think with the implementation in Internetexplorer7 msn will gain market.
I think with the Standard implementation in Internetexplorer7 msn will gain market.
Since the last Datacenter update Google offers nice SERPs. Wikipedia Links are always in the top 10.
P2P Search = The People’s Google!
People will build their own Google using P2P Semantic Web Engines.
Google does an excellent job of figuring out what is relevant for an user…
yes you are right Marcel we make this here all day
Yes Marcel you are rigt. We love Google.
Yes , Wikipedia links allways on top
Oh yes, wikipedia is very good.
Yes is the last one.
Hei! luogo che interessante avete fatto, ben cotto!
Wouldn’t it be silly to assume Google don’t track user behaviour in some form? One one would be to see which links on a result page get the most hits for each keyword combination.
sehr schön 🙂
A lovely side . very much intresante topics and categories.
I think a searchengine with human power is much better than having only a machine for the same action. It is fact that machines are more quick and the result also newer and bigger than the selfmade ones, but we know that machines make mistakes. Is it more important to have big and new results or a better index checked by humans. I think this is the better way for searching and indexing the internet.
For example in Germany Google has a market share
of more than 80% – and that is too much! The abuse of market power is in this case a great danger, wait for the moment till Google will boost click prices and ban enterprises/branches from the search engine results. We all should use more and more other search engines.
i think in some years there have to be regulations by goverment for hadnling googles power!
By integrating analysis of user input – and tags/bookmarks are just one method, albeit a growing phenomenon – with other relevance techniques we tease out the best results we can find. Both Xen and Michael have correctly pointed out you have to do much more than do a string compare across tags and hope that people use the same tag terms. There is also a distinction between people bookmarking sites they want to keep around and rating results as a passing observation. There are many other factors we try to consider. People have generally been posting that they like the results they are finding so far.
I think a searchengine with human power is much better than having only a machine for the same action. It is fact that machines are more quick and the result also newer and bigger than the selfmade ones, but we know that machines make mistakes. Is it more important to have big and new results or a better index checked by humans. I think this is the better way for searching and indexing the internet.
Google does an excellent job! figuring out what is relevant for an user is very important!
Nice Weblog with very much intresante topics and categories.
Iva
I belive that younger people like more searching by tags, but older peoples rather by categories.
The king of all search engines has too much helpers which behave like jesters.
they get to much popularity even on tv and there at some series they always telling the peoples that they use google.
I ´ll think its not funny, because Google is now going into the healthcare, too. Personal Health Records, PHR << you could watch and safe your medications, x-rays and many more. So now google know everything about you.
I believe Google is going to have a monopol. Was hoping that yahoo is going to be better if they get buyed by microsoft but doesn´t seem so.
If Yahoo would would improve his effort in applying an online marketing program which is really competitive to adsense, it could be some kind of real competition but up to now there is no second one in the big shadow of google
A regard-worth side, in which one gladly, also the information stayed were numerous, gives for it no comparison, the high point one reached. Finding of the side was not heavy, but leaving the more.
I think a searchengine with human power is much better than having only a machine for the same action. It is fact that machines are more quick and the result also newer and bigger than the selfmade ones, but we know that machines make mistakes. Is it more important to have big and new results or a better index checked by humans. I think this is the better way for searching and indexing the internet.
E-Business Blog with very much intresante topics and categories.
AM-Iva
[I believe Google is going to have a monopol. Was hoping that yahoo is going to be better if they get buyed by microsoft but doesn´t seem so……]
forget it, google is the monopol in the future.
I think that’s not the question. The question is why the hell should you have the right to decide what’s good or bad for me. What if I decide that YOU would be better with a hole in your head?
“INHO Wink has 3 disadvantages:”
Add a fourth: Marc Andressen, the kiss of death to any venture. 🙂
i don think that any collective will ever be able to beat google. they’ve got the $$
I thin the power of google will increase in a few years. The store books. if they have all books they can change the pastense. George Orwell is right at the end
Yeah now they are having bing but still the leader is google
I think they could do what they like
I think the internet has changed the world and democratized. Google was a great help. But Google is now so powerful and increasingly dominates the media freedom of expression is intended that the democratization is threatened. What do you think? What can we do against the slowly lost of freedom?
Google is on top like it was view years ago and because of the great ideas and tools it will stay there till we grow old. move on G.
I think that google is no alternate for yahoo. About API problems, you can not disputate!