I’ve really enjoyed the conversation that has taken place around Robert Scoble’s videos on, “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years.”
The basic idea is that the Web has gotten too big and Google doesn’t have the power to sift the crap out of its search engine. Scoble thinks that with things like Mahalo‘s human-powered search and Facebook, we’ll be able to better understand what sites we should trust and what sites our friends trust.
While this is interesting, haven we forgotten about Google Web History? Maybe no one else uses this, but it allows Google to keep a history of the sites that you go to which in turn helps to customize your personal search.
The argument could be made that just the act of surfing the Web will show some types of implicit endorsement of some pages and not of others. If Google knows what pages you click and and how long you stay there, it can also understand what pages resonate with you. Google doesn’t need systems which give more explicit endorsements of Web pages, like Yahoo has with Del.icio.us.
What do you think?
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 