The Gong Show

My Thoughts on the “Notificator”

John Borthwick wrote a killer post today regarding Google and the cycle of creative destruction. I wrote a comment on that post, and I’m reblogging my comment here. There’s some details that don’t make sense out of context, so it’s probably best to go read John’s post first: it’s well worth your time.

Great thoughts John; nice mental food to chew on.

I think Twitter search today = WebCrawler of old… WebCrawler is the first search engine I ever remember using, and according to Wikipedia it’s the first full-text search engine on the web. WebCrawler was very dumb. If you searched for meatloaf, it gave you the page with the most references to the word meatloaf… there was no recentness priority, there was no pagerank, there was no weighting on page titles or H1 tags. WebCrawler ended up getting VERY spammy as porn sites figured out they just needed to add giant blocks of popular keyword to their pages in order to game the system. It showed people that search could in theory be a great way to find what you want, but it was crippled as the popularity of the web increased.

I think Twitter search today is equally dumb. When I search “plane Hudson” a few weeks back, I received only an ceaseless stream of RTs and links to CNN articles. No news that told me anything more than what I already knew: a plane was down in the Hudson. That’s not to say that there weren’t very important Tweets happening at that time. On the contrary, the TwitPic from the guy on the Ferry that approached the downed plane (you know which one I’m talking about because it was RT’ed 92498327492 times) was an epic piece of citizen journalism happening in real time. But, Twitter search didn’t source that well… all it did was show me what the most recent RT was, not the most important original tweet.

So, I agree that the “notificator” is important, but we are at the VERY BEGINNING (top of the first inning) of its development, particularly in search. And, I think Google sees this coming a mile away (as does Facebook), and both will innovate on this front. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google released a real-time search engine comparable to Summize in the coming year, but with a different, more-useful algorithm than recentness. Perhaps Facebook too, though that would come with a lot of privacy baggage due to their permissioning system so it’s unlikely.

All that said, I have a lot of faith in Abdur. I think he’s one of the smartest people I know, and he’ll find a way to make Twitter search more useful. I hope it is his priority right now.

PS: one small detail. Google didn’t own YouTube in Nov 2005, so I assume you meant to say Nov 2006.

Originally posted as a comment by andrewparker on JohnB blog using Disqus.