good job. I really enjoyed your perspective here.

It particularly resonates with me because I’m spending far too much time trying to separate the science from the religion in Search marketing.

The only conclusion I can come to is there’s a whole bunch of people claiming to know how to exploit Search but they can’t prove it, to me at least.

The other thing is Search has become dominated, and therefore skewed by big budget brands with commensurate drop in quality.

This doesn’t happen in social media because anything that isn’t “real” gets uncovered in a heart beat.

Steve

Google is in a powerful position and just like Lord MS, they will probably retain much of their kingdom no matter what happens. But there is the problem of too much freakin content. When a search yields over a million results, you’ve got a problem. While it can be helpful if you need general info (like your nationalized example) but if you need particular info, you either need to craft tight search queries or you’re going to have to figure out a way to filter those results.

Humans make decisions based on word of mouth. After all, it makes a lot of sense. A real human can often direct your search in ways that an algorithm cannot do (don’t tell Netflix). As much as Netflix recommends drives my movie watching, recommendations of family and friends has more weight (even when they are wrong!). I guess Netflix realizes this, thus the community element of the site.

Twitter and FB and delicious (for me) are ways we get closer to more personalized recommendations. Obviously voting (like Digg) is also helpful.

Google has put its toes in the water on various more personalized searches but none of its experiments are really driving/replacing other recommendation tools. Google will keep experimenting and eventually beta something that probably brings us more localization and particularity.

But in the meantime, a whole group of people are thinking in very different ways about searching and exploring, which means Google may and will lose marketshare to a matrix of other customization tools based on particular needs of individuals. I’d say most of us will continue to do both, use Google and other more customizing tools.

And of course the great battle between advertisers trying to control our choices and our conversations controlling them will continue because no matter what companies say, social media is about them controlling people (they can’t make money on people just relating).

I’ve rambled this whole thing, so if you can make some sense of it, good! I sure can’t.