Social Is The New Search

Popular Mechanics has an interesting article titled “How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It.“

According to the venture capitalist friend of reporter Glenn Derene, “search, as we know it, is dead.”

In a nutshell: As we continue to populate our Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, building bonds with like-minded users, people will turn to their networks rather than search algorithms for information. According to the article, “the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?”

Check out the whole article, but here is one noteworthy paragraph:

But what may turn out to be the strongest signal of all is the footprint you make with your online identity. Consider how much information you voluntarily provide on your Facebook profile. Now imagine if you could combine that with your Netflix renting and Amazon buying habits. Then throw in the suggestions of your friends and the pages you visit the most often. All those various sources of information about you are currently stored in different locations-on your computer’s browser history, on your Facebook page, on the servers for Netflix and Amazon-but just imagine how accurate a search could be if every time you had a query, the mass of data about you that exists on the Internet could inform the results. (Google and Yahoo already do this to a limited extent by tracking your search history to refine results, and surely startups will try.)