Google Versus Google -- Will Social Search Tear the Company Apart?

Google announced with great fanfare that they were incorporating results from social media sites like Twitter into their search pages last week. So did their search rival, Bing. The difference in how each company is doing this says a lot about the struggle going on within Google to define what the company will be in the future.

You must have a Google profile to see what they are calling “Social Search” results. Even then, the results you see are based only on your existing social networks (you have to be a Twitter member and the search results are only culled from people you follow) rather than presenting all relevant results.

In doing so, Google limits the user’s information and perpetuates an already existing walled garden, something that users could already have done by going to Twitter’s search tool.

My first thought upon seeing this was “Crap, now I have to fill out yet another social profile?” And, I work in social media! This is a little something we call profile fatigue.

Google may have the idea that limiting your Social Search results to your existing network helps them to display the results that are most relevant to you, but I'm not sure that’s the only reason they want you to fill out a Google profile.

You have to fill out a Google profile because long-term Google wants that to be the last profile you’ll have to fill out (a game Facebook is also playing with their acquisition of FriendFeed, a service that pulls in activity from a variety of social networks). Google will then aggregate all of your other profile activity and eventually may allow you to interact with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn without ever leaving the comfort of your Google environment online.

This approach is antithetical to the very core of what Google’s stated mission has always been: “…to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Enter the new Google, the company that offers Google Docs, a web-based application for creating business documents, and Chrome, a web-based browser, and Android, a mobile operating system. The idea behind all of this is to keep users within the Google universe using Google tools. It’s an inherently closed view of the Internet clearly at odds with the opposing, open view that champions the free flow and access of information and the ability to use Google to get to new places and things.

Now, Google seems to say, information has to penetrate Google’s shell rather than Google’s shell expanding to encompass more information. An argument can be made that this is simply an extension of what Google and others have been doing in search by serving up results that are increasingly informed by factors like an individual user’s location and previous search history.

The irony is that Google may have shot themselves in the foot as Bing seems poised to integrate Twitter (and down the road, other social properties) in a much more open, accessible and visible way. You can try the Beta version here (full disclosure: Bing is owned by Microsoft, a client of my employer Reprise Media).

To see what the future might look like, I’ve been pointing folks to a search engine called Kosmix which has its faults but is still the best integration of search material on a single results page I’ve seen.

What Bing and Kosmix both do is to serve up Twitter results based on your search query rather than your existing network as Google does. This makes new content discoverable and helps to promote the free flow of information -- key attributes of successful search engines. 

So far, Bing seems much closer to the future while Google is still grappling with who they are as a company.

(UPDATE: It appears that Google is now indeed pulling from Twitter for Social Search results without requiring a user's Google account to be linked to a Twitter profile. Google does seem to be using a variety of factors to surface results that are going to be relevant, and users who do link their Twitter profiles to their Google login appear to be likely to see results based on their existing friends on the first page of results. 

In light of this I think it's fair to say that Google is moving towards an interesting model that does resturn more information rather than less, using as much about the user's existing social connections as the algorithm can access to organize results in a meaningful way.

This is very different from the functonality of Twitter search and though it does still require a login to access, cannot really be described as a "walled garden" model as I had initially described it.

It's not inconcievable that this could lead to Google integrating more social search results into searches done without logging into Google at all, while continuing to serve up results to logged-in users that are highly informed by their existing social profiles.)

 

Follow Noah Mallin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nmallin

Comments

[kurge71]

Profile fatigue - from a personal and business perspective - is a strong reason why the market for social media aggregation is exploding. Both Google and Facebook are well positioned to be centralizers - as they've both got the eyeballs, tech know-how and understand the powerful market force social-graph intelligence gathering will become. I recently gave a talk on social media aggregation. You can check the preso here: http://www.slideshare.net/kgerr/social-media-aggregation-101

[simstewart]

We totally agree that walled garden's are not the way forward for social search and people really are getting tired of filling in profiles. How many profiles do we want and is it really necessary for sites to ask us for so much personal data in order to provide a good service? If you'd like to have a look at our approach visit cofacio.com, we're a totally open platform, putting the conversation and people first.