Neomeme

Recently I’ve been playing with Searchles, which bills itself as a “social search” site. Basically, instead of bombarding the user with thousands of search results, as Google or Yahoo do, Searchles lets you narrow your search down to specific tags or even to pages bookmarked by users you have added as friends. Recently, they have added the ability to search for pages bookmarked by members of certain groups. The ability to search by tags or groups conveniently For example, if you wanted to search for Ruby the programming language and not ruby the gemstone, you would run a search for Ruby with either the tag “programming” or constrained to the “Web 2.0″ group. By allowing only user-submitted pages into its index, Searchles effectively cuts down on junk and spam, but pays the price of a small, incomplete index(I couldn’t find anything for ruby the gemstone even if I wanted to). Though the practical application of the site may be limited at its present state, particularly with del.icio.us search providing much of the same functionality(except groups) with a much larger index, the idea is nonetheless intriguing. And the idea, the idea behind Searchles and del.icio.us and Digg and every other “social ____” site simultaneously defines Web 2.0 and returns full circle to 1994. A bit of background:

Yahoo, now a top search engine, started out as a human-powered directory. That is, instead of allowing full search of the whole Internet, it limited results to those selected by editors. Bending to pressure from competitors(there were a lot of search engines/web portals in the 1990s), Yahoo expanded into search, email, and the rest is history. The watch-word back then was quantity,quantity,quantity. More features, more services, more search results. In 1998 Google proudly proclaimed that it indexed 25 million web pages. In 2002, when Google had already become a search juggernaut, it boasted of indexing about 2 billion web pages. In 2003 that number was 3 billion, proudly trumpeted on Google’s home page. By 2005, over 8 billion web pages were in Google’s index, still proudly advertised. Surely, Google’s cache has continued to grow since then. But wait… what’s this? By 2006, Google no longer showed the number of pages in its index. By then, everyone knew that quantity was irrelevant. It was quality that was key, and quality over quantity slowly made a triumphant comeback with the advent of social news services like Digg. Now, the quantity of links is no longer important. Instead, the quality, as judged by the crowds online, reigns supreme. Now, instead of a few underpaid editors toiling away in the basement of Yahoo!, the entire Internet community is the editor. No matter how complex or mathematically sound Google’s algorithms are, they can still be gamed(hence the enormous SEO industry). Human-selected content,however, cannot be manipulated by sleazy SEOs. Every link you find has been favorited by at least one person and thus, barring deliberate spam, must have some value.

The truly innovative thing about Searchles’(circles’? Search less-s’? Their weird name is fucking up my apostrophes!) introduction of groups and the ability to search sites friends bookmarked, which del.icio.us paradoxically does not allow is that it is now possible to wittle down the group of editors for your web content, filtering and sifting until a manageable, relevant, and human-readable list of search results is left. This is searching through communities. Community-powered search defies the impersonal nature of a search engine(despite Google’s feeble efforts at “Personalized Search”) and delivers truly personal recommendations, from other people searching for, and finding the same thing. Searchles, del.cio.us, Digg and others are trying to do just that, and I hope they succeed.

First, the accessible web had to get big, with search-engine indexes growing faster and faster. Now, Web 2.0 must make the Web shrink again, for it has gotten too big. Web 2.0 makes technology human-powered, a Mechanical Turk for all communication. In community-powered search, man and machine become symbiotic, for neither the most powerful algorithms nor the most brilliant editor can do it alone.