What the hell are we going to do with all of this data?
There is so much of it, it’s maddening sometimes. Google is doing a fairly good job of organizing this mess we call the internet. I am doing a decent job of saving, subscribing and curating my favorite content. But make no mistake the internet is going to get out of hand. I’ve often cited, and you’ve probably heard, Eric Schmidt’s quote about the amount of data being created today, in 2010.
“Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That’s something like five exabytes of data” -Eric Schmidt, CEO Google
What interesting is that virtually no one cites the follow up to that statement:
“I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon.” -Eric Schmidt, CEO Google.
Take a second to really think about this because it’s profound. We are creating data every 2 days in the amount that it took the previous multitude of centuries. That’s unbelievable.
It took something like Google to create the first internet data revolution by organizing the internet but Google was organizing a different internet than today. Google launched prior to 2003. User generated content was minimal and often limited to the more geeky crowd.
Today, content can be created by anyone and everyone with an internet connection. This creates a ton of billiant content…and a whole lot of noise.
This is what Social Media has enabled, everyone getting a voice.
As this concept spreads and takes hold throughout the world, the amount of social data will increase. As video continues to get higher resolution, the amount of data will increase. As more people get smartphones, more people have tablets and more people have GPS the amount of data will increase.
And this is just the data we knowingly create. Every transaction and every security camera also create data. What is the world going to look like in 15 years if we figure out how to make sense of all of this data.
Right now what we really need are better aggregators
This is where we are right now; we’re at a point where we need a better way to organize data. Google is great, Bing is very good, but there are now search engines on every social site that you use. The web that was seemingly being unified, is now more fragmented than ever. While this is great for innovation it is exhausting for the consumer. Long gone are the days of running a single search to find a product or review. There are now simply too many channels to monitor if you want the best price or the most comprehensive view.
Not every site is open to having Google and Bing index their site. Google just had a tiny tiff with Yelp about pulling data for Google Places. Facebook is notoriously closed because the data they capture is valuable, why give it up?
The future of search is social…
…but it may be a long way off.
Right now Social Search is limited to Bing pulling in “Like” data which is relatively pathetic, Google and Bing showing a few tweets pulled from the limited selection that Twitter has opened up or going to numerous individual sites and performing searches.
What I want…
When I search for a restaurant…
I want the search engine to take into account my location and stop showing me a map of Italy when I search for a restaurant named “Napoli.”
I want reviews from all over the web on one page: Yelp, Google Places (Hotpot), Citysearch, Fodors, Foursquare, SCVNGR, Facebook and Twitter and I should be able to organize the order that they show up.
The reviews should be organized by those in my network first.
When I search for a topic for blogs and news sites…
I want the results ALWAYS organized with the most recent post first.
Each Social site should be a search plugin allowing me to pull in data from any social site with in-network results and public search results.
I want to know right in the results, how many people in my network tagged it to Delicious, submit it to Digg, Liked it on Facebook or sent a tweet about it.
That’s personalized, that’s social search and we need to make sense of it all before the data becomes unmanageable.