We search less, we find more

by Stii

I read this interesting article on MyBroadband about Google vs. Facebook. Basically what they’re saying:

Internet users are increasingly looking for answers to their search questions, not just a list of sites in response to a query.

We’ve grown accustomed to knowing how to optimize our search queries, simply to get the best result. Then you have to deal with the overeager SEO experts who have optimized the least ideal sites for the highest result, resulting in frustration. Lets not go into that other than saying searching is not finding answers.

To find answers, the best place to go is probably a social network. You ask a question, you find answers or at least the best route to the answer. If the humans on the other end of the network don’t know, they normally know of someone who does.

This is what happened to me on Twitter the other day. I was looking into the Groovy programming language and although Google returned a myriad of absolutely great results, it was not a quick answer to my question. In fact, Google’s results raised much more questions for me, so you can understand my frustration :/ As if I need more questions :P Instead a friend of mine on Twitter @geniusboywonder said I should talk to @aslamkhn about Groovy and suddenly I’ve got immediate and relevant answers to my n00b, dumb questions without reading through tons of sites. Exactly what I was looking for! I’m happy.

The interesting part of all this is Google realizes that this is a trend in search behavior. Who could have ever thought that there would come a day when the almighty Google have to be concerned about their search product. Whether you think they are concerned or not, they did raise the issue, which indicates that they are taking it serious. It should be really interesting to see what they come up with :)