Search vs social

We’re talking Search Wars: What does it mean to you?

On Monday Robert Scoble wrote what I thought was a brilliant thought piece on Microsoft potentially buying out Yahoo!, and concurrently also Facebook. Scoble’s take on the matter was that should Microsoft venture this way, what with social media, and particularly FaceBook in this case (based on a small closed marketing experiment), his statistics proved that it (Social Media) carries more weight than ‘traditional’ search. His opinion is that it will out manoeuvre Google in the “dominance of web”.

Of course social is ‘more relevant’ right now. That was one of the reasons for Google’s claim to fame and global usage above all other search engines: The fact that it revolutionised result relevance.

Social media turns your peers into your “relevancy measure” if you like, therefore at this point even if you use search, Scoble’s point is that you might in the very near future prefer to turn to your peers on social networks before making any further decisions. The next natural step is for search engines to open up this kind of data in its search result pages (‘people search’ for example). Hence should MSN venture forth into this deal with Yahoo and Facebook it will create a closed circle of dominance.

Danny Sullivan, a godfather of search (in my opinion of course) actually took Scoble to task on the statement that search and specifically finding anything via search engines is dying. Google is not as behind the times as some might think.

OpenSocial is of course one brilliant investment. Should Microsoft move ahead with Yahoo! and Facebook and close off the loop from Google, it is not as final as one might think. Google is still indexing very nearly all pages of Facebook, and with the potential of where OpenSocial could go, Google will have access to a much wider variety of data than just FaceBook.

It is certainly not the end of search, but an evolution to the next step in providing the relevancy measure that people are seeking once again.