Rich Skrenta says winner take all: the search and online advertising markets both belong to Google. Google's not your competition, it's the environment. A commenter on my WHIR blog agrees. I brought up social search and natural language search; he (she?) says both are lost causes. Google's algorithm will ALWAYS be better. Well, unless we reach the point of "neuro network responsive search engines that assimilate and search for the information we desire from patterns in our brain's firing neuro networks".
Somehow the last part of that comment made me think of Clive Thompson's recent Wired article on Pleo, a robotic dinosaur that's "specifically engineered and enhanced to mimic life and relate to his owner on a personal level". Your Pleo (which you can pre-order starting next month) will be like nobody else's: "Interaction with his environment has subtle effects on his behavior. Every Pleo eventually exhibits a unique personality".
Wouldn't it be cool if Pleo-like customization could be applied to search? Different people would get different results based on their previous search behavior. It might also be useful to have an Amazon-like recommendation engine running in the background, matching you with sites that are most heavily trafficked by "people like you".
As it turns out, that's pretty much what Collarity does. I read about it on Read/Write Web's Search 2.0 roundup. It offers a slider that let's you choose between personalized search (based on your past activity), anonymous/automatic social search (using data from "communities of same interests distilled from the users’ behavior"), and global search (prioritized based on all users' keywords and results).
At a time when Aggregated Knowledge offers software that helps visitors navigate more efficiently within websites and Quantcast's statistical model can estimate viewers' age, education and income based on their clickstreams, Collarity's approach feels more up-to-date than Google's assumption that heavily linked-to sites are universally appealing. Its system (which seems to be Yahoo! powered) seems kind of slow, though. And there's very little advertising info on its website. But just imagine the possibilities...
Armed with growing volumes of data on "people like you", Collarity could show you ads for items that they've searched for - items you may not yet have heard of, but are sure to want! Ok, my friend Aaron (an economist) was freaked out by my previous post on predictive ecommerce, and my other friend David (an attorney) thinks there's sure to be a privacy backlash. But if CVS can mail me coupons for that new dish-washing detergent I ought to try, why can't search engines do the same (albeit in real time) on behalf of advertisers?
Maybe what we need is a multi-tier system, similar to what CVS offers? (You can shop at its stores anonymously and pay full price - or allow the company to track your purchases in exchange for better deals.) Search engine users could be given the options of-
(a) Searching anonymously: history is not saved, ads shown are keyword targeted
(b) Associating search history with user account: ads shown are behavior targeted
(c) Adding demographic info, and perhaps even personal wish lists, to user account: ads shown are totally customized
... with (b) and (c) receiving a cut of the ad proceeds in addition to custom tailored deals?
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