Google has made two very interesting moves this week. The first was to close Lively, the company’s version of Second Life. The second was to launch SearchWiki, or personalised search results.
On the surface, these don’t look related. Closing the virtual world Lively might look like a simple investment call, but Google hardly has to worry about cashflow. The company has many projects that on the surface don’t make a great deal of money.
Google said: “we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.” The company also added that: “We’ve learned a lot about how users interact in rich social environments, and we hope you’ve enjoyed your time with Lively.”
Not learning enough, it seems, to keep the party going. And learning about people is what keeps the company growing, which is where SearchWiki comes in. Lively didn’t give Google enough data to chew on. If it had, it would still be going. But SearchWiki is a potential data goldmine.
With SearchWiki, users can now remove and promote search results directly in the Google page, make comments, and allow people to view what others have done. Google’s search algorithms may be the secret sauce, but adding this layer of user feedback adds another whole dimension to what Google knows about us. Given the millions of Google account holders and the billions of Google searches, it might well be the most direct and largest customer interaction project ever devised. Don’t like that search result? Kill it, or say why.
It’s only just launched, and there are already over 100 SearchWiki notes on Obama. And the data is flooding in. For example, the Wikipedia page on Obama, the second link, has 17 positive votes, two negative, and four comments, including, “I disagree with the suggestion that this be the first result. Google’s general pattern is that the site belonging to the search target comes first, and the best site about the target (often Wikipedia) comes second or third. Search for [ibm] or [yankees]. This pattern makes sense to me.”
Of course there are huge ramifications for spam tactics, coordinated action, censorship and the like. But the overall message from Google this week is loud and clear: we don’t do things just for fun – there has to be some payoff. And that payoff is data.
