Above is part 3 of a 3 part Robert Scoble video blog series on “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years.” To see the other parts scroll on the player; Part 2 at around the 6 minute mark gets to the main points*.Essentially Scoble argues that Google is in trouble because they are unable to adapt their algorithms and business model in the face of social search sites such as Mahalo and even Facebook; Techmeme is thrown in for good measure as well. Scoble argues that the search results from sites such as Mahalo will appeal to more people due to their ability to be socially constructed as opposed to Google’s computer generated results.
As much as I think that Jason Calacanis is doing a good job with Mahalo, and that he is creating decent content for those frustrated by current search technologies, I’m not even sure Calacanis would be so bold as to argue that his company is going to kick Google’s butt in four years time.
Scoble though does open the more interesting question: what is the future of search?
I won’t even start linking to the many, many search startups that are trying to answer that question.
Scoble seemingly forgets though that even if Google’s current model doesn’t incorporate social search, there is absolutely nothing stopping Google going out and acquiring one of these companies then incorporating their model within the Google product family. I’m also not convinced that we are yet to see the David to Google’s Goliath, but I could be wrong.
* for what ever reason Kyte insists on showing only the latest video in the embed so I was unable to include Part 2 straight up.
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Part I of Social Graph Based Search. 14:41 minutes.
Part II of Social Graph Based Search. 15 minutes.
And a bonus round III. 6 minutes.
Come now Duncan, Mahalo and Techmeme as Google killers? Robert is really putting up a reality distortion field to rival Mr. Jobs if he thinks that one jives with the way the world works. You could -almost- reasonably argue that Facebook could put together an great search engine based around its social graph but even that is a stretch.
Techmeme is a techie’s toy, a fantastic one that I couldn’t really get through my news day without but nonetheless a toy. Mahalo is a noble experiment that might make some waves, but will ultimately need to rely on its niche of evangelists to keep revenue flowing. Never of these products can garner the type of mainstream appeal that Google has. At least not in their current forms.
To beat Google, you have to have something that is as useful to “MySpacers” as it is to the entrenched tech crowd. Neither of these three products, even Facebook, has quite enough universal appeal. Nor do they appear to be able to get that in the foreseeable future.
It’s hard to believe Google is such a giant. Honestly their search engine is practically useless and they only search 4/5 of the web??
Human search is the future, but no one has figured out how to do it.
Google would have tanked long ago without ads and nothing else they copied or started is either good or the market leader.
They have to buy brands (YT) and then figure out a way to make money from them.
I don’t think they’ll ever die, but the future of search has to be personal people based interaction.
That doesn’t seem quite right. Mahalo isn’t looking to replace Google, they’re looking to piggy back on Google, IMO. Rather than optimizing for the long tail they’re positioning themselves to be the top result when searching for common terms. I mean, how often does Wikipedia come up when you search for something? If it’s a noun, especially a proper noun, it’s usually above the fold.
If Mahalo can create super high-quality content about, say, home rental and purchasing, then everyone searching in that ballpark will be directed to Mahalo. Bingo, bango, tons of impressions.
Maybe I’m totally wrong, but I just don’t see their “technology” as being scalable to Google-like levels, especially since Google is all about the long tail.
Steve
I didn’t say I agreed with the proposition
For those interested (at least at the time of writing) the Kyte.tv embed also has chat. Nifty feature where you can discuss Scoble’s video.
@Max:
“Honestly their search engine is practically useless …”
You are almost certainly a crazy person.
I know Duncan, I just got bombarded with this on twitter and my feed reader at the same time. It makes very nice weekend link bait, but all it really accomplishes is stirring up the old — “Google is dying” meme.
Google’s search is entrenched and “good enough” for most people. A Google killer will need to be able to monetize itself as well as Adwords has for Google, distribute itself as well as Adsense and provide hand over first better search results (or something that breaks the paradigm so completely that traditional search is seen as old hat).
Why would you even bother putting this article up?
There really must be more important news happening in the tech world.
I am sick of morons like this wanting their 15 minutes, i just wasted 2 min of my life that i can never get back.
Thank you
Predictions! Somebody please gift scoble a copy of the black swan
Mahalo uses Google results. It’s all same. It’s PHP grabbing page.
ASP.NET to write search engine
Hey, duncan…
Careful…. Don’t waste TC reader’s time. They get piss off.
They are working web 2.0 thing.. They don’t like to argue….
Or… Google buys Facebook… Google clones Mahalo with 2 weeks of work and adds it as a supplement to Google Search… Google buys Wikipedia for good measure aaaannnnnnnndddd…. no one gives a damn what techmeme is because Google News 7.0 is out by then.
Advice
I’m not 100% sure where you are coming from. I’m not sure if this wastes people’s time. Sure, it’s not ground breakingly amazing but the subject matter is interesting, after all if I could answer the question (what is the future of search) I wouldn’t be writing for TechCrunch, I’d be the head of a multi-billion dollar startup
The chat since I put this post up (via the Kyte embed) has made it worth while by itself
Are Scoble and Jason thick friends?
Scoble’s post does not make a strong case for Facebook or Mahalo coming even close to Google.
Everyone seems to be missing the fact that Facebook is still the number 2 social networking site in US. It does not have a strong user base in South America and Asia like Google does. Any analysis which does not take into account the global nature of the internet industry is bound to have a large error margin.
Mahalo’s strategy seems the exact antithesis of what Google did against Yahoo. For some time, Yahoo did stand by their original strategy of having a ‘direrctory ‘ for finding relevant sites on the net. As the number of websites grew exponentially a human powered directory strategy failed. It simply can’t scale. The growth is even faster now with countries in Europe and Asia, having joined the internet bandwagon. Having a human powered search engine like Mahalo’s can simply not cope up with the amount of available information across all geographies, not to mention the number of languages used across these geographically distributed websites.
completely agree about social or people being google’s weekness. the future is social search, but barriers to entry is high and google has the inferstructure. they have the best chance of delivering. especially with people like david baily from amazon in their camp (product lead for universal).
Scoble has officially jumped the shark.
to #9 (I am not kidding you, regardless of my stupid URL): Mahalo uses Google results where they have not written a human edited page. Mahalo hasn’t been around that long (what, 4 months?) and doesn’t have that many pages yet. The pages they have created are substantially different than the Google results. Still, I found this (as twitted by Scoble himself) amusing: Google works fast:
http://onotech.blogspot.com/20.....coble.html
I think it must be an astronomical small % of the people who saw the videos would have ever queried: google, mahalo, facebook, techmeme, scoble ? Regardless, the speed of Google is most impressive, and I doubt with an army of Mahalo guides you’ll ever see that kind of update speed. Then again, Mahalo isn’t being designed for people who’d do such queries.
I don’t buy it. Google is like God, I mean, Cmon…do you really see any signs of slowing down?
this is one of the silliest things i’ve read on tc. i don’t mind you posting this duncan. it’s worth knowing that people have ideas this silly. or at least agendas this silly. and i don’t think max is trolling. he’s taking a postmodern approach to this blurb. and i appreciate his sense of humor.
I’m not sure that I had a go at Max, indeed I smiled at his comment buster (19).
As I’ve said in other comments I didn’t say I agree (I don’t), but I think the broader question is valid (what is the future of search). The discussion, in part in the comments here, and even more so in the chat with Scoble via the Kyte box has been interesting and worth having.
Mike (16): I’m thinking slot machine style futurism
Who cares…. I can’t wait to see GI JOE the movie 2010. I hope they make it better than starwars & lord of rings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DN034sBeF4c
Social search sites (like http://www.tallstreet.com/ ) offer a way to more fairly rank search results. It means sites arn’t ranked solely on popularity, which is all google does.
There is definately an advantage to their method.
I dunno…
Alt+D, type “goo”, hit down arrow, hit enter
That’s just instinct to me, hardwired into my system. Google’s good enough.
I mean, I’ve never even heard of Mahalo or techmeme, and never visited Facebook (been to MySpace once though). Google’s a verb I use all the time - I go Google it. It’s hard to beat that popularity.
“As the number of websites grew exponentially a human powered directory strategy failed. It simply can’t scale.” - Manoj
What about dmoz.org then?
Cheers,
Hobo.
Like in the good old days of Usenet, here’s the crosspost of my comment on Scobleizer :
Read Mahalo’s FAQ carefully, especially #2 “What sites will I find / not find on Mahalo?”. Question : do you really accept that someone is deciding what’s good and what’s not for you ??? What you should read and what you should not ? Which info you could get and what you can’t ??? Hey Guys, time to wake up : don’t you think this kind of universe looks familiar ? What a “Brave New World”…
_Marc
“Google will be beaten by …….”. Quote by “…..”. Good way to get your name in the blogs on a slow news day.
And BTW, how is Mahalo different then Wikipedia, other then the fact that they need to pay people to create their content? I’ve never been able to figure that out.
Why not just build a smarter search on top of the Wikipedia content? Or pay people to link search terms to content in Wikipedia, instead of writing new content/links? I can almost picture the dinner conversation that inspired Mahalo. Its not going to work.
I’m all for taking on Google, not because I don’t like Google but because I think everyone always needs to get in the ring with the Champ, but the more and more I read that sites like Mahalo are the best thing all of us can think of to take down King Google the more I believe that they are going to be wearing the Champ Belt for a long, long time.
Robert Scoble needs to crawl out from under his rock. Outside of the valley no one cares about Guy K, Mahalo, techmeme etc… and as far as facebook, myspace is still way larger. and for all the talk of api and widgets, the number of third party widgets on myspace dwarfs facebook by 9 to 1.
what I think a lot of people are missing here is Scoble has a lot at stake here. if this social graph becomes the foundation for search, he is at the top of the “influencer trust” food chain. Podtech is clearly on its way into the deadpool so he’s going to need a new gig soon.
he clearly doesn’t like seo, but the social graph can be gamed just like any other system. in fact it is gamed all the time on myspace and its starting on facebook too.
We believe that the future of search should be in helping people to easily find information on the Web and not just return thousands of pages.
Google are innovating all the time, most of the time you probably won’t notice and I’m sure if they don’t have something in the works just now, they’ll acquire it.
I agree too. I actually have the tagline for it. “_You_, and experts in offline subjects like yourself are smarter then one million dumb processing units.” There is def. a need, I and I think people are smart to see the need but no one has got it right yet. RollYo.com was close and I thought they would get a lot of traction when they first launched, but they missed it too. The open API in to Yahoo (and other) search evens the technical playing ground and (rightly) forces the next major search engine to come up with a really, really, really good idea. Not just a good one.
Mike, any chance if giving Duncan his own feed? Unless you really ran out of things to write about…
OK…after learning about Scoble’s video I’ve now resolved to kill Google, in four years, and am sketching out my four year plan. Here’s what I have so far:
2008: Kill Google Ride Finder
2009: Kill Google Mars
2010: ???
2011: Google: RIP
Any help with the plan would be much appreciated, thanks!
Scoble proves himself an idiot again. We’ll have a post on this over at TechDumpster.
This is pure link baiting and Duncan Riley falls for it as usual. Yawn. TechCrunch gets worse by the day.
The issue with google is that they seem to be ruled by the geek attitude.
They only build impressive tools without heart for the mass….
TechDumpster (comment 33)
why in the world would you think that I would think that this is anything other than link baiting, Scoble is the master and he’d probably admit it if you asked him. If you read my other comments though you’ll see that I still think that the overall question is worthy of discussion. The chat (of which I’ve only just now, as I type this disconnected from) was one of the better chats I’ve had online recently, good crowd, interesting discussion.
How can you beat Google? They might lose in search but they make money on ads. The only reason the search engine exists at this points is because it generates pageviews. Google buys eyeballs through its content sites so that it has “legit” traffic it can offer advertisers. Will any advertiser contest hits it gets from a google site?
Secondly, what the fuck is that beeping noise? It seems to happen whenever someone chats. What an annoying widget.
The truth is, I barely use Google anymore for comprehensive searches.
I use the del.icio.us search, it never let’s me down.. I really like Tag based searches, and # of people who saved that page as a favorite.. I really do think it is the future.. nothing can beat that…
The only weakness of del.icio.us is the speed of showing search results, sometimes I wait 30 - 40 seconds for the results to show up, but, it’s worth it..
P.S. I have tried many tag search engines such as:
http://www.keotag.com/
http://www.simpy.com/
and some more..
Nothing comes close to the ease of use and efficient results as of del.icio.us
P.S #2 If you thought del.icio.us was just a bookmarking tool, I thought so too
for the first couple of weeks - until I actually noticed the “search” field on the top right hand corner..
~ Ilan
Google for such cant lose sleep over this sites cos they can always come up with one of their own like they have always done by buying up other sites that have they potential to position them in social search. very well sites like http://www.mediarati.com will be potential target.
There are so many holes in this I don’t know where to start.
To embed Part II of Scoble’s channel simply add /47146 to the src url in the embedding code (makes …MarbachViewerEmbedded&uri=channels/6118/47146 ). This will show the video you want, also after Robert ads more shows.
Cheers.
Unfortunately, this is all the preserve of geeks. The masses simply don’t know what search results they want and couldn’t care less. I speak to people the whole time who say ‘oh, I didn’t know Google had adverts on it’!?!? Masses of people use MSN Live search, even though the results are often less than useless. They use it because it is the default on their system and they don’t know any better and simply don’t care. SEO only upsets the geeks. The masses will bumble their way through booking a hotel in New York via some crap SEO’d (or even paid) result in a search engine because it’s the first thing they come across without thinking.
It is upsetting, yes, but I fear it is the reality.
well — maybe facebook and myspace have way better content than orkut, mahalo — never heard of it
but dude u gotta understand google is an elephant , its rich in cash and rich in r&d , if it has nothing in the works , it will just buy lef-right and center …. also did u hear the results of google last week — they doubled their profits — thatz double their warchest ………… also — google is coming out with something really special that will rock the boats of all the top biggies — by this year end ..
Google caters to the masses. I bet there are millions who only know Google synonymous with search. Ask them scalability, algorithm, SEO, ranking, deep linking, social search and all that mambo jumbo and see what they come up with. They will enter these words right into Google search to find out what it is.
I wonder if Google is asleep. Especially after reading this Scoble video. This is laughable indeed.
I admire someone who will make a prediction, even if it’s most likely not going to happen. IMO Google won’t be unseated anytime soon but social search is going to be part of the mix. It doesn’t seem likely though that Maholo will be leading the charge based on what I can see of their company.
Duncan i believe you started some great dialogue. I never read all the comments as in depth as I have in this post.
Look as for now i think Google will not be passed over. Saying that in 5 years time if we are still searching the same way as we do using Google I will be very surprised and disappointed. As we all know google is far from perfect and I am sure they know that too.
I lump this with paul grahams microsoft prediction. good luck.
I’m sorry, but I have to ask: does Scoble even understand how each of these systems work? Has he looked at what Google has built, infrastructure wise — and I dont mean just hardware infrastructure, but also mapreduce, google file system, etc. Has he read the paper on the Google architecture — mahalo for “anatomy large scale hypertext search engine”, I mean google for it.
And then even if there is a technically superior solution, there is really no guarantee they would be able to capture market share. Two different things entirely.
@Duncan: I realize you understand that Scoble is link baiting, but even if you thought the topic worthy of discussion, why point to Scoble’s article as the starting point — surely there are better articles on the future of search?
What’s really funny is all of these people bitching about TC wasting their time, yet they waste enough time to post about it wasting their time.
A little moronic, don’t ya think?
This is the oldest trick in the book, Muhammad Ali did it , Wrestlers do it.
You say something outraegous to draw attention , and for Scoble attention = traffic = $$$$
Way to play right into his hands.
is it me or KYTE is the most annoying player on the planet?
Damn! Even when I’m writing this I hear it “Pinging” …I have to switch off audio to quietly browse comments.
D@#$@$!!!
I really hate applications that emit sounds even when they are stopped.