Yesterday we ran a story about remarks made by Yahoo!'s VP of Front Doors, Tapan Bhat, at the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. Bhat said that the dominant web paradigm was shifting from search to personalization. "The future of the web is about personalization," he said. "It's about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalized for the user."
Some analysts and reporters saw this as an admission of defeat by Yahoo! and the Times Online article which we quoted from ran under the headline: "Search is history, says Yahoo!." But, Yahoo! says that the Times reporter was a bit overzealous. They released the following statement to us to clarify Bhat's remarks:
"Web Search is a top priority for Yahoo! and we are committed to developing and investing in new technologies that will shape the future of search. We believe personalization tools complement our efforts in search and will play an important role in delivering the most relevant information to help consumers get a more complete answer and connect them to their passions, their communities and the world’s knowledge."
Our original post on this topic yesterday generated a lot of comments, mostly from people saying search will always be the dominant paradigm on the web and Yahoo! would be nuts to think otherwise (though some people agreed that personalization will play an ever increasing role in the battle for user attention). I'm going to reprint a comment that I made on the original post, which sums up my personal view of this issue.
"I don't think search is ever going to disappear, but I can see what Yahoo! and Google are both talking about when they say that personalizing your user experience is the next dominant paradigm on the web," I wrote yesterday. "It's no longer enough to go online and search for specific information, it's about getting specific information from trusted sources delivered to you (RSS, etc.), having new information you're interested in delivered to you (StumbleUpon, MyYahoo/Netvibes, etc.), having your email, banking, stock portfolio, address book, and other personal info all at your fingertips."
We mentioned yesterday that social networks like Facebook and MySpace, with their intimate user knowledge, and widget ecosystems that keep users on site, might be in a very good position to dominate a personalized web. Yahoo!, which owns some of the most popular content sites on the web (News, Sports, MyYahoo), is also seemingly well poised to take advantage of better personalization and command more user attention.
What do you think? Can a more personalized user experience help propel Yahoo! or some other site ahead of Google?
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Not So Fast, Search Isn't History Quite Yet.
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It will take a hell of a LOT more than personalization to propel Yahoo! past Google. If they can't control their appearances in the media any better than that... the message will never get out about just what, exactly, they want to be when they grow up. First it was search. Then it was portal. Then it was entertainment... now it's search again and looking like Portal all over again beyond that. C'mon!
Posted by: Gerald Buckley | June 5, 2007 6:54 PMPersonalization is important, but I think Google is delivering personalization anyway. Yahoo will never beat them.
Posted by: Coleman | June 5, 2007 8:45 PMthis is a bit silly.
search is never dead.
it's simply about the evolution of a search session....
one that is capable of wrapping the most relevant content from the most trusted sources to each user.
talk about the evolution of search and personalization but quit the "is dead?" lines. it just doesnt typically boil down to that black and white.
as it stands now, i am able to personalize my own "search" via custom feeds and meta feeds sent to my gmail account utilizing labels and filters. pro-actively.
Posted by: sull | June 5, 2007 11:11 PMSomeone, anyone, please take down Google. If their whole network weren't so ugly, disconnected and buggy eternal betas, I might not mind them owning way too much data... but their services are ugly, disconnected and buggy eternal betas.. so I do. Kill them off, please. I've made Ask.com search my default for the week.
Posted by: Dan Grossman | June 5, 2007 11:53 PMPersonalisation is clearly a trend in the 'improvement' of how users perceive their search experience.
The question to me is whether the resulting loss of privacy / handover of intimate and private details about yoursel is really worth the marginal increase in search results that is attainable by people, who already know how to customise their searches.
As I see it the incorporation of personalisation in search will lead to 90% of all users ending up exposing themselves and their private data to aggregation, storage and profiling through an opaque mesh of private databases some of which will be compromised.
It should be the responsibility of the search community to devise solutions through which users can attain the search benefits of personalisation while still maintaining full control of the extent to which their personal data is exposed.
Posted by: Kristoffer Nilaus Olsen | June 6, 2007 1:28 AMAnother interesting aspect of personalizing search relates to the more general task of ‚Äúhumanizing‚Ä? results. There‚Äôs a lot to be gained by making results more people friendly instead of coldly automated. Jason Calacanis‚Äô Mahalo is a good example of a company that has exploited this. I‚Äôve written more on re-introducing the human element in software here:
Posted by: Scott Eblen | June 6, 2007 6:15 AMhttp://www.libraryhouse.net/blog/2007/06/06/the-next-big-thing-humans/
Finding the distinctive ‚Äúneedle in the haystack‚Ä? has always been a pretty lightweight task for most search technologies. Search personalization (like Google's, Yahoo's, or Collarity's) will improve people‚Äôs chances of finding that personally relevant ‚Äúneedle in the needle stack‚Ä? ‚Äì that page that looks contextually identical, from a search engine‚Äôs perspective, when compared to millions of other pages out there. That page may be highly relevant to me, but my search results are driven by the links of others ‚Äì not me. The move toward user-defined personal search relevance, whether feedback is collected explicitly or implicitly, seems inevitable and we are certainly in the early days of that evolution. To your point, once a search engine understands ‚Äúmy perspective‚Ä?, I shouldn‚Äôt have to do as much searching ‚Äì information should flow to me based on my preferences from my trusted sources. Search personalization will be a choice/option for those that want less waste and spam as they try to find the information they need on the web.
Posted by: Rob Rustad | June 6, 2007 10:56 AM