Find me if you can
In a world full of answers you start your journey by asking the right questions…. and by journey I mean search.
In reality every time you begin that journey the odds are heavily stacked against you finding exactly the right answer you are looking for. That’s of course assuming there is a right answer. You may find an answer but will it be the best possible answer that is available at that time?
Over the past 20 years I have been lucky enough to have designed and built a wide variety of search engines. Everything from Web Portals and Enterprise Information Systems to Location and Collaborative Intelligence Networks. So I have some understanding of the technicalities and practicalities of discovering answers through online search.
To help you to imagine the challenge Google, and the other search engines, face every time they answer your question try working your way through this basic mathematics quiz. Think of a number between 0 and 3 Trillion and then ask a friend to guess the right answer. With each response tell them if they are higher or lower than the value and see how many guesses it takes to find the exact answer to your question.
It should take no more than 41 attempts. The average is around 40-39.
This of course is the Google promise. The idea that from 3 Trillion possibilities you can rapidly identify the top 3 answers to any question by allowing google to manage the 41 degrees of separation between you and the right answer.
Of course Google isn’t fool-proof and it doesn’t work all of the time but Google’s Marissa Mayer believes it is a 90/10 solution to the problem.
This means Google has solved 90% of the problem, and it works well 90% of the time, and it will take a significant amount of R&D (9x) by the competition to finish the job.
The question, for all those trying to compete in the Search Engine game, is simply this: Is the extra 10% worth it?
Would building it deliver a competitive edge and would anybody notice even if it did. After all Google’s top 3 results are normally only the first step in the journey to discovering the right answer.
So has Google nailed it? Is the search for search over?
If we apply the Big P:Small S formula then the answer is YES!
The 10% problem is not big enough to warrant the 90% solution being built.
However not everyone agrees and Redeye’s Josh Kopelman has some interesting thoughts on this question. As does ReadWriteWeb’s Alex Iskold.
Google became the market leader by creating a Hyper Intelligent Node that scans the network for content. In effect delivering a 1-Dimensional solution to a 4-Dimensional problem (i.e. Content, Nodes, Networks and Time) by turning the network into the database.
In the future Google’s competition will not come from somebody who tries to build a more efficient Hyper Intelligent Node. It will come from someone who sees the world differently.
Today data (e.g. Web Pages, Images and Video) is like dust. Google’s approach to the problem, like many of the early search engines, is akin to a vacuum cleaner. The dust needs to be swept up into boxes or compartments before it can be of any value. Maybe clouds is a better analogy given the current focus on cloud computing.
However when it comes to relationships between people, ideas, places or pretty much anything then search as we know it today is pretty much a blunt instrument.
So what is going to change? What will make how we navigate the MobCon landscape so different from how we navigate the web today? Will it be more intelligent data (Content), a more intelligent node (Google on steroids) or a more intelligent network?
Tomorrow we will see intelligent dust. Data that thinks for itself and makes its own connections. Tomorrow we will also see more intelligent nodes and more intelligent networks.
Tomorrow’s market will not value search engines but intelligent gadgets that tune into the intelligent dust floating in the intelligent wireless network.
Tomorrow the market will not be concerned so much with Search Engine Optimisation but with mastering and navigating the Six Degrees of Separation across this hyper-intelligent landscape.
Tomorrow the question on every marketers lips will not be “How do I use Google to build a brand online?” but “who or what do I know today that will put me in touch with these people tomorrow?”
Would you like to catch a glimpse of what tomorrow may look like? Then take a look at this start-up: Cruxlux.
As Techcrunch reported earlier this year they are doing some really interesting things with the practicalities of searching and navigating the six degrees of separation. The company has built algorithms that will automatically figure out how various people, places, things, and topics are related on the web. So you could try putting in your name and President Obama and see how long it takes to get there:)
We are also starting to see the arrival of complex data visualisation tools like Microsoft’s Pivot (see ZDNet’s Pivot: Microsoft’s experiment to ‘view the Web as a web’, ReadWriteWeb’s Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects and now TechCrunch’s An In-Depth Look At Pivot, Microsoft’s Newest Data Visualization Tool,) and Google’s Image Swirl.
Pivot represents the meeting place where Business Intelligence meets the World Wide Web as leading BI vendors like Microsoft see the potential of applying their niche corporate data visualisation tools to the much bigger problem of “Surfing the Web”.
These emerging technologies are not working with intelligent dust or a more intelligent network. They just more intelligent nodes. Some with a different type of intelligence to that currently employed by Google’s generic search engine. But, conceptually at least, it is a step in the right direction.
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