General search and vertical discovery


Entrepreneur interview by Bambi Francisco
August 7, 2007 | Comments (1)
Short URL: http://vator.tv/n/34

5

During one scene in the movie "Bourne Ultimatum," Jason Bourne goes to Google to conduct a search. It's scenes like this that underscore how conditioned people have become to rely on search engines for answers. Going directly to a general search box has become the de facto way to begin the discovery process for just about anything. But with billions of pages indexed (Google stopped counting at 8 billion pages about four years ago), the question has increasingly become: How do you discover what's relevant in the cluttered online world? This was a topic for a panel at the Stanford Summit, held last week. Paul Martino, CEO of Aggregate Knowledge, Joe Greenstein, CEO of Flixster, David Hyman, CEO of MOG, and I were on the panel.  For the three other panelists, whose companies have been around far longer than Vator.tv, discovery essentially comes in the form of recommendations. Aggregate Knowledge monitors behavior and buying patterns and makes recommendations. On Flixster, people recommend movies through the process of sharing. The MOG service recommends music based on a person's music selection. At Vator.tv, we're just at the beginning of recommending relevant pitches to help people discover ideas. While people on Vator.tv share or recommend pitches frequently, our value add at this point is to provide one place where ideas can be discovered. Aggregating and organizing content around innovation, or around any topic, is the first step to helping people discover. Much like the general search engines, Google, Ask and Yahoo, helped to organize the vast Web in the Web 1.0 days, vertical sites are doing the same thing -- simply organizing the content. Some people at the event later asked what the difference is between search and discovery. After all, when you're searching, don't you expect to discover? Good point. But searching on a general search engine typically starts off with an intent to find something. Discovery, as Paul Martino says in this video clip I took of him and Joe before our panel, is about "unexpected and magical" results. 

 

 

 

 

1 comment

Matthias Schwarz
Matthias Schwarz, on August 8, 2007
A big part of Google's phenomenal success has been its reliance on secretive and more or less scientific algorithms, which remove biased judgement (user recommendations) and faked relevance (desperate use of misguiding keywords). While not impossible, netizens know that it is rather difficult to artificially improve a web site's relevance in search results - the very essence of the implied trust we have developed in Google's search results as being magically on target virtually all the time. Obviously, Google has now become so dominant that monopoly fear in itself should make us question if there's just this one truth to search results, which currently happens to be the Google answer. Personally, I'd like to see the best of both worlds: Hardcore analytic relevance determination coupled with meaningful (preferably automated and behavioral) user participation in specific areas of expertise, something attempted for consumer products buzz on wize.com with a surprising level of success for first-timers. The challenge will be to make "vertical discovery" universal and not restricted to a particular topic, something that Google has excelled at for general search.

Login to reply Matthias


Contribute to
If you are a thought leader, create your own channel and distribute your voice to our news partners.

Latest company updates on Vator.tv

Rentcycle was featured in a article: "Splash culminates with Splash Box" 33 minutes ago
Investors from Greycroft, Venrock, NEA and Ackrell Capital analyze RentCycle - Splash overall winner See more
Smaato Inc.'s data was edited about 3 hours ago
Smaato Inc.'s data was edited about 3 hours ago
Smaato Inc.'s data was edited about 3 hours ago
Yield Software, Inc. was featured in a article: "Social media marketing, Part 3" about 3 hours ago
Outline a strategy and an objective See more
© 2010 Vator, Inc.