Just when you thought that Google had once and for all solved all of our search problems, you realize that half of your Google searches end not with you finding what you want, but when you decide you just don't care enough to keep searching. Sigh! Maybe I'll go further and suggest that Google's failed searches has contributed to the intellectual "shallowing" Nick Carr lamented in his book. It's not that we don't want to know more... it's just that we can't find it (at least not fast enough)!
Fortunately, when big technology companies stumble, they hoe the soil from which innovative startups spring. There's a new batch of search companies coming our way (wearing various guises). Quora, a semi-social Q&A service, is perhaps the widely touted at the moment. There are also a couple social list sharing services getting some buzz (e.g. path.io, pearltree). But social is a red-herring when it comes to search. It might feel that Google is algorithmic and not social, but even from day one, Google's page-rank algorithm has relied on social mechanisms (in that case, people linking to sites they found useful) to discover and rank content on the web. With these newer services, however, the identities of the ranker is gaining prominence.
This could very well be a continuation of the trend away from the anonymous web. Anonymity might aid "free speech" in some niche topics, but has come at a cost of greatly depreciating the information we find online. If we have no way of verifying the reliability of a piece of information, it makes the information close to useless. Or put in another way, information is only as good as the source. With sites like Quora, we can trace the information back to a specific individual and verify their credentials.
That makes for a much more satisfying search experience.
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