The Future of Your Searchable Brand – With or Without Google?

January 22, 2008 at 10:05 pm | In Futures, Personal Branding, Podcasts, SEO, news | 2 Comments

The DLD conference was yesterday and it was held in Munich. The highlight of the event (Thanks TechCrunch) was a session called “Humans Disrupting Algorithms,” in which David Kirkpatrick of Fortune spoke with Jimmy Wales and Jason Calacanis. Jimmy has developed a beta of Wikia Search, whereas Jason Calacanis has been running Mahalo for a few months now. Jason said “60% of people are not happy with search results, up from 50% last year.” Both of these search engines are operated by humans. The 60 employees who run Mahalo are paid, whereas the people running Wikia are not. The idea with the creation of both is to eliminate the “pollution” that Google has because of people who develop thousands of websites for SEO advantages.

Google’s VP of Search Product and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, commented on human v. algorithmic search results from the audience.

“The problem isn’t with the searching process, it’s with the result. You can’t do the fat If you read Chris Anderson, the real value is in the long tail. So if I did a startup I would do something else. I would do a Facebook.”

My opinion

I don’t see Google losing market share, but it do see a percentage of the people who traditionally use Google switching to these other services when they are in search of more “hard results.” You can’t search for your name in Mahalo unless you’re a celebrity or someone recommends a link to your site. Whatever happens, your going to start having to perform maintenance on these other sites just in case.

Do you think that search engines should be human operated or by Google’s PageRank algorithm?

2 Comments »

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  1. I think Jason said at some point during this event that “the fat tail will be human, the medium tail social, the long tail algorithmic”. I think I agree with this.

    Human powered search can never scale the way Google has. This is why the original idea of the Yahoo directory has been replaced with Google.

    Mahalo is on the right track. Having guides creating and moderating the site are keeping the spam out. Having the Mahalo Social and Mahalo Greenhouse fills in the big gaps that the guides haven’t been able to get to or where there isn’t a high demand. Then for the really rare searches leave it to the algorithms like google to fill in the cracks.

    Comment by Andrew Shell — January 22, 2008 #

  2. Interesting questions. I was talking to a friend about a future without Google just the other day, and it sure creates some interesting implications.

    I think it’s probably a good thing that people have options for the type of search they want, but the main issue is just how or whether people understand the type of results they are getting.

    Comment by Tiffany Monhollon — January 23, 2008 #


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