The next generation of search results may be driven by social recommendations, leaving some and wondering if Facebook may be a legitimate challenger to the search throne, if Google can’t quickly “get” social.
Claire Cain Miller writes that Google’s success is dependent on an open Web it can spider and index and return as search results. The walled gardens of social networks disrupt that flow of information onto Google’s servers:
“As people spend more time on closed social networks like Facebook, where much of the data they share is off limits to search engines, Google risks losing the competition for Web users’ time, details of their lives and, ultimately, advertising.”
To counter this trend Google has said it intends to become more social, and last winter began indexing Facebook, Twitter and MySpace data. However, Cain Miller writes that the company’s efforts at creating its own social tools, such as Buzz, have not generally been successful.
“ ‘There is some belief at Google that their DNA is not perfectly suited to build social products, and it’s a quite controversial topic internally,’ said a person who has worked on Google’s social products who would speak only on the condition of anonymity.
” ‘The part of social that’s about stalking people, sharing photos, looking cool — it’s mentally foreign to engineers,’ the person said. ‘All those little details are subtle and sometimes missed, especially by technical people who are brought up in a very utilitarian company.’ “
