Silicon Valley Watcher has this article today: The Death Of The Search Algorithm? Techmeme Has Six Editors
Interesting. I realized last night that Pandora is a core “must-have” for me. It has learned what I want to hear, and does a wonderful job filtering and serving content relevant for me, now. So I’ll put a different spin on that article: Generic keyword-based search and/or “the super-smart machine” paradigm is passe. Smart, mixed-initiative, content and context based relevance filtering is the future of the internet. The idea that humans, whether at page-design time, content-discovery time, or page-display-time (i.e., the end reader) can do all the selection is rendered untenable by the information flood. On the other hand, the idea that there are “magical” algorithms that can unerringly determine relevant content, whether content-based, link-based, social, or “semantic”, is equally naive.
We’ve heard about “vertical search”. I think a much more exciting opportunity is in content selection much more broadly considered, as a key element of any and all sites, as an intermeadiary between site-owner intent, end-visitor interests, and the web-visitor and content-generation communities.
Visit DigitalScirocco’s site for my take on this opportunity.
