Thursday 9 September 2010

Has Search Spiked? Maybe. Who and Where are also key, perhaps more key than What.

For almost a decade, search was the pre-eminent content discovery mechanism online. If you wanted to find something, you stuck a phrase in a search box, hit the button and hoped for the best. And for a long time, that worked just fine: Google refined their groundbreaking algorithm so it eventually seemed to know exactly what you were looking for.

Google Instant: the technology anti-climax of the decade - Telegraph

Will the next 10 years see social and spatial linking replace search as the content discovery means of the Internet.

After playing with something as silly as foursquare for a few months I was surprised to relieve how much data was locked in spatial relationships I passed ever day. Foursquare and geo-positioned twitters are inserting the web in to the city of London, which I really love. Search is limited because you have to know you want to find the data before you can start to find it, with social networks and geo-data you can discover data you didn't know you wanted until you find it.

In SharePoint 2010 I see the expand MySite as the next big thing, perhaps even rendering much of the improvements in Search and the addition of Fast Search less valuable. Staff will be able to use networks of knowledge more effectively, which I have always seen as the killer app of SharePoint myself.

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