Life Without Google ( Search )
I received a link to an article today on Eric Schmidt’s vision of the future, a world where passive search is the norm, not active. In the article, Mr. Schmidt talks about “knowing your needs before you even ask.” There are examples in the article about walking down the street and having your mobile device recommend restaurants or shops based on your prior activities and interests. While I agree that the future is going to be about contextual information, I don’t think Google is necessarily the best positioned to lead us going forward.
I think it is very clear that the next few years of the Internet are going to be about “where.” We have spent the last decade or more concerned about who, what and when. If you follow any of the major technology blogs, it is obvious that lots of people feel this way. Venture money is pouring into companies focused on location-based services. There are major technology confabs focused on solving problems of where.
I think as or more important than where are the twin questions of “who with” and “who from”, and of those two “who from” is paramount.
The example from the article about finding a Mexican restaurant helps to make my point. I don’t necessarily care that a Mexican restaurant was rated highly by people I don’t know. I will care more about a Mexican restaurant being rated highly by people I know and trust, plus or minus a few degrees of separation. Instead of searching Google for that restaurant, or Google passively recommending things as I walk down the street, it is far more likely that Facebook is the kind of application I will get that information from. The obvious disadvantage Google has in this fight is that they cannot crawl Facebook and index my personal information.
In the future, why wouldn’t I search Facebook for movies I want to see, or places to eat, or what doctor to go to? I am not talking about posting an entry on my wall asking for opinions. Rather, I use Facebook just like I use Google today. As people share more and more of their lives online, Facebook becomes far more important to me than Google for decison-making. And, if I want to expand the scope of my search, I can search all publicly available information on Facebook and probably have less to sift through.
If you add in the ability to figure out the “who with” question, it’s still more compelling. If you re-imagined the same scenario in the article in a bit different light, it might go something like this: Tell me where I should eat tonight based on recommendations of my social graph in combination with who is already out tonight. Who better to answer that question that than Facebook?
It’s a stretch to think that Google search might become less relevant. We use it so much every day that it seems indispensable now. If, however, information becomes more cloistered in private networks, and Facebook is the biggest private network, then it seems that the gatekeepers of the information will be uniquely positioned to facilitate the next wave of innovation.
What are your thoughts? Does Google have the right strategy to continue it’s domination?
Update: This article in TechCrunch is an interesting add-on to my points above
