La Meme

An algorithm will never understand you completely and every ‘product’ (if we are to believe our MBA textbooks) has a life cycle. At present it’s inconceivable that search will ever be usurped by any other medium as an entry point for the web. But while search is ultra efficient it sometimes lacks the personalisation and relevance of information passed from mouth to mouth.
Emerging services such as twitter, facebook, stumbleupon and digg provide much more personlised entry points into the web than search. Someone you respect sends and interesting link, someone else tells you about a breaking event, someone shares an idea with you.

Personalisation (something which search does not offer well) and group membership are really good at finding us things that we ‘might’ be interested in. This takes the web back to the television model of push publishing via channels, where we make one decision (which channel to watch) and relevant information is pushed at us. If the relevant information bores us, we just switch channel.

The notion of a channel on the Internet is ugly and cumbersome, it does not translate well. If we had to compare to the notion of a television channel, an internet channel is more of a wavelength that is bi-directional, more than that even, it’s now onmi directional and interferes with other channels. Television channels can’t interact with each other to spawn new channels for example, Internet channels can. The word channel, for me, is actually impotent in describing the interactive state the internet can bring.

I would say that we are heading towards meme culture, one where we access and are exposed to trains of thought via many access points, where we touch the information or the information touches us and we react or consume. Search plays a big part in this but is in no way the master of this realm.

A meme is a trend. The subversive web is a trend engine, where fads come and go, services are picked up and are dropped, daily topics are gobbled up and regurgitated and eventually filed in archive.org.

Search is a diverse activity and can resist to an extent the trending that goes on, but it’s not invincible. Search engines must have their eye on these new entry points as they begin to pick away at market share. The evolution of the web’s products or features in our lives rolls on regardless.