The Oscars, Google’s search algorithm, the Eurovision Song Contest– they all famously choose the “best” answer to their questions by finding out who recommends whom -or what. The Oscars poll members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) – “the Academy” to its friends – to see who gets the most votes in a series of categories. Google looks at the number of incoming links into a webpage, and the authority of those pages, to determine the authority of a webpage. The Eurovision Song Contest gives each competing nation several votes of different values that they can cast for anyone other than themselves. It seems like a democratic system, on the surface; at least it is if you’re a member of the Academy, own a website, or if you’re on the Eurovision committee for your country. Could you imagine only letting some people vote for your country’s president? It all seems a little elitist to me. What about your poor huddled masses? Most are not members of the Academy, don’t have their own website, nor are they living the dream of being part of their country’s Eurovision committee. I’m thinking a lot more though, are probably members of one social network or another: Facebook (originally an elitist closed eco-system itself), MySpace, LinkedIn, Windows Live, to name just a few. Might there be something there that could really democratize the web?
Last year, Bing managed to incorporate something that Google has been chasing for a while: true social search – as opposed to just universal search surfacing social content in the search results. Bing’s partnership with Facebook has given them access to the industry-standard social network. A hive of data that can be tapped to give even more personalized search results. If you are looking for a restaurant, and are logged into your Facebook account, then Bing will deliver search results that highlight restaurants that your friends “Like” – a true recommendation from a friend – on top of the algorithmic selections that they deliver. This is a huge step forward for personalization – and is one of the reasons that both Google and Microsoft were chasing a partnership with Facebook – although I don’t think that Bing received the acclaim that they deserve for this innovation. It’s an interesting -and a positive-system, as there is no “Dislike” button, but as seen with relatively recent developments in Google’s search results, they are starting to consider the sentiment of pages that are linking to other pages to ensure that a page that is linked to with a lot of negative reviews is not gaining a top result, and as such greater exposure and more sales from the SERPs.
The interesting part of this to me, is a question: “What is the next data source?” I realize there are a lot of people busy working on or trying to work out what the next Facebook is, but I’m talking solely from the data perspective: Google needs to find an equivalent to Facebook, which is no easy task. They have made several attempts over the years to foster social networks of various sorts. One that I noticed recently was the Google Profile Pages – an opportunity to have users link through to their social networks, Twitter feeds, YouTube profiles, so that Google can understand what each user is doing and where. Google does not want to be reliant on a third party for their social indicator data if at all possible, and Bing shouldn’t rest on its laurels either. Microsoft has Windows Live, and could integrate a “Like” function – or a grading system if they wanted some more indicative data – fairly easily into the product to start generating their own “peer review data” for personalization purposes.
Either way, there is a potential sea-change in the way that Google, Bing et al are ranking pages – could social peer review be the new link-juice? It presents an opportunity to ask not only the Academy, web developers, or committee members, but to ask the common person what their take is on a topic, and use that information to make tailored recommendations to their social-network-searcher-friend. Is this the wisdom of trusted crowds?
Can Microsoft capitalize on their lead? Is Google’s brand strong enough to get the data they need to take on the combination of Bing and Facebook? There is a lot to come in this space in 2011 as the search superpowers fight this one out and try to improve their recommendations and personalization. Bring on the New Year!
