"Search is dead. Long live the Internet!" or the Coming of Age of Social Search ... Like it or Not.

Google rocked the tech blogosphere with this week’s announcement of “Search, plus Your World” – a massive expansion of its Social Search project launched in 2009.

No sooner had Google made this announcement than its former Social Search partner, and now major competitor, Twitter, was firing with all guns blazing essentially accusing Google of breaking Search (as we know it). The statement is so compelling, that it is worth repeating here once again:

“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and tweets are often the most relevant results.

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Google’s response to Twitter, on its Google+ account was a bit shorter, and, in typical Google minimalist style, acidly to the point:

“We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”

For those who may not be aware, “rel=nofollow” refers to Google’s inability to index content from Twitter as part of its PageRank algorithm, subsequent to the end of the aforementioned agreement with Twitter.

Intriguingly, neither Google’s #1 target/competitor in the Social space, Facebook, or (main) traditional Search competitor, Microsoft (or its search partner Yahoo!) have said anything official on the issue to date. This is an important silence, which I will explore later.

I have been observing the almost universal condemnation of this development by the tech blogosphere with some alarm … even my learned colleagues at DiploFoundation have weighed in (see Mary Murphy’s response and Peter Cranston’s opinion).

In this seminal Wired article by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff, “The Web is dead. Long Live the Internet”, it is argued that the future of the Internet will be based around apps. They also posited that they browser will die; with this I disagree. However, I believe that the underlying argument for the death of the browser is spot on. As the Internet evolves, users will become LESS interested in browsing and searching and more interested in simply GETTING and DOING.

Search Engines (and I don’t just mean Google, folks) have long been failing us in providing USEFUL Search results given the increasing gaming of the system by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies (see for example this infamous expose. I challenge you to examine the true “relevancy” and “usefulness” of the first 1-2 pages of bog-standard Search results (although Google has, at several times in 2011, aggressively revised its Page Rank algorithm to counter the SEO takeover). Note well that several SEO apologists have been very vocal against Google’s recent moves to improve its Search results. SEO is an extremely lucrative business and it would be ludicrous to expect these companies and their well placed bloggers to simply roll and over die while the most popular Search Engine in the world essentially shifts or eliminates their business model.

Well respected Search expert, Danny Sullivan, has provided hard evidence of Google’s shift to move externally gamed results even lower down in its non-personalized results with its drive to provide essentially contextual results to users WHO ARE LOGGED IN. Even in cases where users are not logged in, Google has begun to shift the game. And for good measure, a slightly divergent view of the drastic nature of the changes is presented by Business Insider CEO and Editor-in-Chief, Henry Blodget.

Is there something essentially WRONG with Google attempting to make Search more semantic, relevant and contextual? Absolutely Not. Is there an issue with its attempting to use Google+ results to assist with this for LOGGED IN Google users? No. Google has already provided two opt-out options when you are LOGGED IN receiving some eminent praise for this approach. Now, is there something WRONG with Google giving “preference” to Google properties (like Google+, Google Maps/Places, Google News, YouTube and Blogger) when presenting results if you are LOGGED OUT? Well, that is the subject of the Anti-Trust investigations currently underway. My take? Google’s Search product does not a exhibit “true” monopoly traits (rather, it is what I term an “earned” monopoly) and Google remains free to use as well as free to shift away from or replace – with minimal, if any, switching costs … especially for non-Google account holders who have never switched on their Web Search History. Importantly, both Microsoft and Yahoo! have approximately 15% of the US market share each, probably around the same globally or just a bit less … and there are many, many other free and open Search Engines in the market which are available for use by casual users who have no “investment” in Google properties.

Which brings me to the deafening silence from Microsoft, Yahoo! and Facebook on this. As already observed, Google started the drive towards Social Search back in 2009 to which Microsoft (and effectively Yahoo! as Microsoft’s Search partner) responded with in small doses over the 2009-2010 period and finally in in February 2011 (see Bing expands Facebook Liked Results):

“A few months ago, we announced an exciting partnership with Facebook to make search more social. As part of that work, we introduced Liked Results, which promotes links your friends have publicly liked or shared via Facebook. Today we are extending Liked Results to annotate any of the URLs returned by our algorithmic search results to all users in the US.

While we are very excited to talk about our next development, we’re all aware that it’s all part of a longer journey. This is the first time in human history that people are leaving social traces that machines can read and learn from, and present enhanced online experiences based on those traces. As people spend more time online and integrate their offline and online worlds, they will want their friends’ social activity and their social data to help them in making better decisions. Integrating with Twitter data 16 months ago was one step, and exploring Facebook’s rich streams is another.

If your friends have publicly liked or shared any of the algorithmic search results shown on Bing, we will now surface them right below the result.”

Yep, that’s right. Bing/Yahoo! have been doing pretty much the same thing that Google is being pilloried for launching with its own Facebook partnership (and strategic 1.6% ownership/investment stake) since February 2011. So, now we understand the Microsoft/Facebook/Yahoo! silence on this development. But whither Twitter? See here for an even more intriguing behind-the-scenes spin on this saga.

Will Search become better and even more relevant, contextual and semantic if Google’s new “Social Search” offering i.e. “Search, plus Your World”, indexes and surfaces more and more of our content on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, for example? Definitely. In fact, a key Google engineer, Matt Cutts, points out, that in the absence of the ability to “deep dive” into many of these sites’ treasure troves of our personalized information (due to lack of explicit permissions being granted by these sites, and quite probably for good reason due to the obvious privacy concerns), Google still does an ok job of attempting to show what it can find.

What does this all mean? CTO of CBS Interactive, Peter Yared is one of the Technorati’s few practitioners who have come out in support of Google’s overall thrust to evolve the Social Search model by arguing:

“So why not replace increasingly gamed and lame search links with socially curated links? The search results were increasingly irrelevant anyway.”

Even more support for Google’s move in face of the hyper-hysterical reaction of critics has come from a quite sober and insightful article on the Huffington Post by Marvin Ammori – where he also addresses the hypocrisy of critics in light of the aforementioned Facebook/Microsoft Social Search efforts. Ammori notes that, from a legal perspective:

“The New York Times quoted Professor Mark Lemley, of Stanford, saying that antitrust law just doesn’t apply here. Google has wanted to index and present results from a huge portion of the web that is invisible to Google: Facebook. So now Google is presenting its own social content, and antitrust, in his words, simply cannot restrain this practice. Lemley, like me, is a lawyer who has done some work for Google, and my law firm continues to do some work for Google, though not on this product.

I also don’t see the antitrust problem, but I haven’t seen an actual antitrust theory proposed. I assume the argument is one that the courts call “monopoly leveraging,” where a dominant company extends its monopoly from one market into another market. People argue Google is a monopoly in search because it handles over 60% of queries. But being a monopoly is not enough — that is the natural result of having better search results. To be illegal, under leveraging theory as I understand it, Google would also have to have a “dangerous probability” of monopolization of the new market–social. (Trinko, note 4) No offense to Google, but I just don’t see how Google has a dangerous probability of knocking off Facebook in social.”

So, although the jury is still out on how more relevant, contextual or semantic these changes REALLY make our Search results and associated experiences and how “BAD” this is for us … (see here for some surprising user reactions), nobody can deny that Search as we know it is evolving … and rapidly. The emergence and runway popularity of Apple’s Contextual Search (really Answers) Engine – Siri, and the upcoming Android competitor, Majel (from Google) Voice Actions (and possibly Tell Me from Microsoft) in the exploding mobile search space will drag Search even further away from its humble beginnings into the Semantic space … possibly kicking and screaming. IBM’s Watson technology (and its emerging competitors) will likely accomplish the same for Enterprise Search.

We cannot escape the reality that the Social Search dream/fantasy is now truly real and already coming of age. Prepare for it. Until then there is the LOGOUT button or the very cool DuckDuckGo for a supposedly “pure” circa 2004 Search experience if that is your cup of tea and what you REALLY want.

;0)