Search 2.0?

Posted by Miles Evans

Sorry for the lack of posts last week. The truth is I am running myself raged looking for deals on condominiums in Bangkok. Bangers has a population density greater than almost any city on the planet and the traffic is so bad I am lucky if I can get to see more than one building/day. The other problem with buying property out here is mortgages are pretty much out of the questions, so the entire amount needs to be paid in cash. Yippee.

If anyone is looking to buy a condo in Asia I highly recommend skyscrapercity.com.

Alright aside from sitting in traffic (of the vehicular variety) I have been working on some personal projects including dev’ing out a digg clone. I am not ready to reveal anything quite yet but you can acquaint yourself with an open source digg clone at pligg.com if you’re curious. The development is still quite early, not to mention buggy, but hey you gotta love a free framework.

Speaking of digg I spent some time with Google’s new Co-op page. I have often wondered when Google was going to socialize the search experience and this work in progress appears to be just that. From their developers tools:

You can also create your own topic. For example, if you have a great deal of interest in Mars missions, you could provide a customized search experience on Google for that topic. The customized search experience would provide labels that users can click on to bring up results specific to that label and topic. For instance, if you build a Planet Mars topic and you search [mars rovers] you could get labels specific to Mars to help quickly refine your search. Other people can benefit from your work as well by subscribing to you so they too get your labels. If you subscribe to someone, you'll notice new links above your search results for queries relevant to their labels. These links are created as a subscribed link display:

Wow eh? So far your labels need to be built in XML format and uploaded but it is not too difficult if you follow their example. So without over dramatizing it this would appear to be the most significant change to organic search we have seen in some time. Many are even heralding this as the future of online search or search 2.0. With the incredible popularity of sites like digg and newsvine, one had to wonder when big G would get on board.

The jury is certainly out on where search will be a year from now but with the boom of personalized and social content it seems to be a given there will be some core changes on the horizon. With the speed at which the digg phenomenon has evolved, maybe even some key players.

Posted May 15, 2006 at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!