Collarity: Power to Your People
May 10th, 2007 by Collarity
We, of course, love discussions about the advancement of search technology and we were gratified to be highlighted this week in the “Top 17 Search Innovations Outside of Google” article and search innovation poll on Read/WriteWeb. The results, as of this post, are included to the right.
We think there are a couple of big things happening in search right now.
One, power is headed toward the people. For websites and web publishers, we think power is heading toward your audience. The foundation of search relevance is moving beyond power-link brokers and more toward end-user consumers on the edge. It’s easy to point to explicit feedback models like Digg, reddit, and social bookmarking sites. But we think there is an implicit customer feedback model that provides better results.
To better understand what’s happening, think about all our web analytic friends at the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco this week. They’re focused on trying to better understand online “customer engagement” through the all of the tiny pieces of of visitor behavior (searching, playing videos, stopping videos, scrolling lists) that tell a rich implicit story of user likes and dislikes. It’s all about actions on a page, and the pageview statistic going the way of the dinosaur.
Which brings us to the second big thing we see happening, search (most people think of Google) is blending with discovery (most people think of Amazon). Once user-engagement can be effectively measured and organized, people shouldn’t have to spend so much time searching for stuff — it should come to them. The same collective intelligence being gathered to refine search results can also be used to provide recommendations and advice — “visitors who searched/viewed this, also searched/viewed this”.
As search moves beyond links and pages, closer to people and actions, everything gets more relevant.