Google Launches Blog Search
Yet another addition to the search service offering by google, Google’s blog search is currently in Beta.
What do you think about this?
As I think about this search feature I see both "amazing" and "cause for concern": On one hand the individuals/groups usifg blogs/sites with a blog interface are able to make their mark more easily, and in many ways media and news is returning to the people. Or course there also an implication for this as to what constitutes a reputable source vs simply it having been written and therefore it is true.
I am not clear on why Google is going this way, though given the success of technorati and the movement towards personalizing the news and/knowledge we read/seek rather than taking the answers from one place e.g. a single newspaper/website/news program on TV, this makes sense. Commercially, too I suspect it has to do with the likelihood for a very valuable/profitable service addition ad-income wise!
While I am happy as a blogger and can imagine the positive implications, I also think this is something to watch and requires a lot of conversation and learning about knowledge and information and how it shapes us and the world we see/create.
I look forward to watching this evolve…as ’small’ as this seems, this is going to have a big long term impact: it marks a clear beginning of what is going to be a vastly changed media landscape in the coming years…where blogging and other social media play a significant role in shaping how we see and respond and interpret the events that are happening in the world. That world is already here, but now it will be made easily accessible for even the non-blogging community - everyone with internet knows to ‘google’.
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November 3rd, 2006 at 9:35 pm
i don’t know. i don’t see this as a news source or media source or a way for people to get more exposure to their blogs at all. i just see this as a potentially good research or networking tool to see who else out there is interested in the same things as you. i also think this is a great way of addressing chris anderson’s the long tail. so, i don’t really sense there should be more concern compared to say, google’s main search function.
here’s the thing about google which makes me just roll my eyes sometimes: practically everything from google labs is in beta. it’s a way to keep up their innovative image, but not that much really ever leaves beta and makes that big of an impact. they do things because they can and pretty soon, that gets old.
adding to this, google most likely won’t get old soon because it operates on a very regimented 70-20-10 model where they spend 70% of their time and money on just two things: main search and google ads. 20% goes to experimental stuff like gmail, news and google earth (blog search would go under this category), and 10% is spent on acquiring innovative start-ups like youtube, jotspot, dodgeball, picasa, orkut, etc. in many ways i think the 10% portion is what will keep google interesting and revolutionizing, which is genius because google itself doesn’t have to do anyting except throw money at people who already did all the dirty work.
take a look at some conceptual ideas that capture the essence of the internet evolution much better than google is doing. like shiftspace: http://www.shiftspace.org/. two guys from my year started this and they just got a huge swiss grant to continue working on it this year.
also, i don’t know if you read thomas friedman’s column. this is an interesting one from today, which i’m sure you will enjoy…
The Taxi Driver
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 1, 2006
I arrived at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport the other night and was met by a driver sent by a French friend. The driver was carrying a sign with my name on it, but as I approached him I noticed that he was talking to himself, very animatedly. As I got closer, I realized he had one of those Bluetooth wireless phones clipped to his ear and was deep in conversation. I pointed at myself as the person he was supposed to meet. He nodded and went on talking to whomever was on the other end of his phone.
When my luggage arrived, I grabbed it off the belt; he pointed toward the exit and I followed, as he kept talking on his phone. When we got into the car, I said, “Do you know my hotel?” He said, “No.” I showed him the address, and he went back to talking on the phone.
After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in the dashboard — on the flat panel that usually displays the G.P.S. road map. I noticed this because between his talking on the
phone and the movie, I could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a column on my laptop. When I wrote all that I could, I got out my iPod and listened to a Stevie Nicks album, while he went on talking, driving and watching the movie.
After I arrived at my hotel, I reflected on our trip: The driver and I had been together for an hour, and between the two of us we had been doing six different things. He was driving, talking on his phone and watching a video. I was riding, working on my laptop and listening to my iPod.
There was only one thing we never did: Talk to each other.
It’s a pity. He was a young, French-speaking African, who probably had a lot to tell me. When I related all this to my friend Alain Frachon, an editor at Le Monde, he quipped: “I guess the era of foreign correspondents quoting taxi drivers is over. The taxi driver is now too busy to give you a quote!”
Alain is right. You know the old story, “As my Parisian taxi driver said to me about the French elections … ” Well, you can forget about reading columns starting that way anymore. My driver was too busy to say hello, let alone opine on politics.
I relate all this because it illustrates something I’ve been feeling more and more lately — that technology is dividing us as much as uniting us. Yes, technology can make the far feel near. But it can also make the near feel very far. For all I know, my driver was talking to his parents in Africa. How wonderful! But that meant the two of us wouldn’t talk at all. And we were sitting two feet from each
other.
When I shared this story with Linda Stone, the technologist who once labeled the disease of the Internet age “continuous partial attention” — two people doing six things, devoting only partial attention to each one — she remarked: “We’re so accessible, we’re inaccessible. We can’t find the off switch on our devices or on ourselves. … We want to wear an iPod as much to listen to our own playlists as to block out the rest of the world and protect ourselves from all that noise. We are everywhere — except where we actually are physically.”
A month ago I was in San Francisco and went for a walk. I was standing at an intersection waiting to cross the street when a man jogging and wearing his iPod came up next to me. As soon as the light turned green he sprinted into the crosswalk. But a woman driving a car — running a yellow light — almost hit him before she hit the brakes. The woman was holding a cellphone in her right ear and driving with her left hand. I thought to myself, I’ve just witnessed the first postmodern local news story, and I crafted the lead in my head: “A woman driving her car while speaking on her cellphone ran over a man jogging across the street while listening to his iPod. See page 6.”
Hey, I love having lots of contacts and easy connectivity, but in an age when so many people you know — and even more you don’t know — can contact you by e-mail or cellphone, I’m finding this age of interruption overwhelming. I was much smarter when I could do only one thing at a time. I know I’m not alone.
A few weeks ago I was trying to find my friend Yaron Ezrahi in Jerusalem. I kept calling his cellphone and getting no answer. I eventually found him at home. “Yaron, what’s wrong with your cellphone?” I asked.
“It was stolen a few months ago,” he answered, adding that he decided not to replace it because its ringing was constantly breaking his concentration. “Since then, the first thing I do every morning is thank the thief and wish him a long life.”
November 7th, 2006 at 1:53 am
I think the phrase “continuous partial attention†is beautiful. That seems to sum it up perfectly.
I was thinking the other day about overhead. Like in manufacturing, there’s some overhead cost to researching, designing, and engineering an object. When it’s mass produced, the overhead is amortized out over the millions of copies of that object, so that per unit the overhead cost is negligible. Switching context has a similar quality. If you’re working on task A and are interrupted, it takes you a bit of time and mental energy to readjust to task B. If you’re able to sit at task B for a long time, then the overhead of the context switch sort of amortizes over all that time. But if you’re interrupted with task C, and then task D and then…it’s as if all your time and energy is spent on context switching and almost none of it spent on the tasks which are causing the interruptions. Or, you’re in a state of continuous partial attention, never able to fully and deeply attend to any one task.
So I like the Friedman story, alice, thanks very much for posting it.
Google has stated plainly that they want to make all information searchable. Blogs are a timely, faddish, easy information source to index. Yes, it’s also another place to stick ads, and since Google purportedly subsists almost entirely on ad revenue I suspect one of their main aims was to generate more ad space. I think there’s something deeper going on, though. You have to ask yourself **why** they want to make all information searchable. I don’t think it’s about ads.
This blog search looks to me like another move in their information consolidation. It seems to me there’s bound to be a sort of critical mass effect, where at some point most people will default to Google to find anything they might want. It also seems to me that if that were to happen, Google would be poised above a tremendous goldmine of information about what people look for on the internet. They already sit on a goldmine I guess, but if they were to control some large majority of all internet searches, holy cow that’d be something else.
You have to imagine they’re working on a way to search for flights and hotels — Google Travel or some such (linked up with Google Earth of course, and Froogle in case you need to buy stuff when you get there…). So imagine they have those kinds of searches cornered, too. They already have a beta Google Finance thingy for searching for stock quotes; you can imagine they might hook up the ability to do trades some day. And on and on, anything you do on the internet you can imagine Google getting involved in, and when they have their search engine indexing all those different segments of information and are keeping records of what people are searching for in each, well that’s what I mean when I say “holy cow.”
It’s as if every time you search for something you give Google a penny. That little piece of information about you, namely your interest in something, is almost valueless to you (can you make money from your desire to find information about “hermit crabs”?). However, by collecting and correlating millions of little pieces of information like this from millions of people each day, Google can make tremendous value for themselves, just as they could if millions of people gave them a penny each day. They can invest that value and accrue interest and make quite a lot of money and power out of it. It’s brilliant, if you think about it, because the average person doesn’t perceive that they’re giving something away wyen they do a search on the web. They perceive that they’re getting something free of charge. The more information segments you can search with Google, the more sources Google has for accruing these little pieces of information about people.
They may be subsisting on ad revenue now, but I don’t think that will continue. I think someday, whether they’re vocal about it or not, Google will switch to a model where they subsist on reselling their data. Bloomberg charges $40k/year at a minimum, comparable to Lexus/Nexus and other such high-end subscription data sources. Google could start (maybe already is?) doing that kind of business too, but offering much more timely, dynamic data (because they have access to what people are searching for right now, as in Google zeitgeist, or what people are blogging about, …). Google Finance looks an awful lot like what you’d get from Thomson Financial, another rather expensive subscription-based data service. I strongly feel that’s the direction they’re going — they’re right now collecting, massaging, tweaking, cleaning as many data sources as they can, so that later they can resell this data to law firms, media sources, etc. as a yearly subscription service. Google has a huge leg up on L/N or Bloomberg or whatever because, in addition to providing information, they also have data about what people out in the world search for. This is a huge value add. It’s one thing to know there were 100 articles about Iraq today; it’s quite another to know that 1,250 people in Boston read the NYT article online between 10 and 11 AM, and 527 people read the Philadelphia Inquirer article in the same time period, and that of the 1,250 in Boston who read the article about Iraq 937 of them read the article about the Congressional elections. And of course you can learn all that because you have the Google search engine hooked up to that meta-information. Google can do all that right now, it’s just a question of how clean the data is and whether they’re trying to sell it yet or not.
So I thnk that’s why they’re doing blog search. It’s another way to collect pennies from us.
November 7th, 2006 at 8:02 am
Hi Natalie,
Think it is an interesting tool since you can start building very
specialized human screened search engines. The blog search in itself
is not very interesting I would say, but more that you can gather
sites around topics and make them searchable. Of course blogs could
be part of it.
JD