What’s Google’s core business? Aside from advertising, of course. Well duh: search. Search is at the root of what Google does; it’s the reason they can even sell you advertising in the first place, because it’s keyed to what you search for.
Earlier in the week, on Shutdown Night, we had a friend over who lives in DC and is searching for a new place to live, owing to a massive soap opera with her landlords (who are splitting up) – but her situation is complicated by the fact she has a dog. No problem – my first instinct is to jump on Facebook, make sure all my old DC people are on the post, and pitch her situation and requirements to see if they have any insight on pet-friendly accommodations in proximity to either where she works or a Metro line that will get her there. Bibbity bobbity boo.
Warren Ellis had a 12-issue comic miniseries called Global Frequency, which John Rogers (of Leverage fame) turned into the pilot for a series. It didn’t get made, but the pilot leaked on BitTorrent and became a cult hit. The premise is that there is an organization known only as the Global Frequency that exists outside of normal government and multinational channels, largely focused on cleaning up the messes left behind by the Cold War and other clandestine nonsense (and funded on the sly by the countries that created those problems). The organization consists of its mysterious leader, her mysterious assistant who runs the switchboard and the screens…and a thousand people who have The Phone, which will occasionally ring, and you will be asked to bring your particular talent to bear on the problem. Linguistics, physics, sharpshooter, free-runner, guy who built his own homemade rocket – if you are the best there is at what you do, at some point Miranda Zero shows up on your doorstep and hands you The Phone.
The thing is, we all have that. Doctors, video game designers, amateur pilots, psychologists, law enforcement, insiders at Fortune 100 tech companies, knitters, journalists, artists, lawyers, Foreign Service officers, cello players, National Geographic photographers, librarians – all of those and more are just in the first hundred or so people I see on my Facebook list. Now maybe I’ve lived most of my last fifteen years on the Internet and benefit from having built out an eclectic group of friends and acquaintances to start with, but if somebody says “dog-friendly lodging in DC,” my first thought isn’t to type into Google, it’s to punch out a post – “hey DMV, you are on the Global Frequency” – and see who replies and what they suggest or report.
Google used to be much better at this. PageRank and its algorithms did what Yahoo hadn’t been able to keep up with by hand and Alta Vista simply wasn’t capable of handling: cut through the crap and get to what you want. But as one writer after another is reporting, the eternal quest for SEO and ad revenue is leading to an explosion of redundant content, scrape-off sites, and out-and-out spam between you and what you want to know. And if you can post on Facebook, or fire off a tweet and get a response, how much faster and more reliable is that than wading through ten pages of Google links trying to see which of them might have valid information and which are LITERALLY the same forum content recapitulated three times over with different ads NASCARd around them?
If Facebook – or Diaspora, or Twitter, or some other social networking entity I can’t even imagine yet – can do a good job of streamlining the path between the knowledge our friends (and theirs) possess and what we want to know, it would trump any search engine you can think of. If somebody figures out how to make this work reliably – and then monetize it – look out.