mediajunk

One of the reasons I rarely blog any more is because I have migrated to social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Let's Face(book) it (sorry!) -- why would you write an essay about one or two links, when it's easier to write a line or two about them?

Social media have changed the landscape of the web over the last few years, and have even posed a threat to Google. Why? Well, the information you find on Google is OLD compared to the information that's on social media. Okay, much of social media's "information" is little more than prattle, it's value is in it's immediacy. Social media gives us the instant opinion. When we hear a rumour, a breaking news story -- it's social media we want to search, not out-of-date web pages.

Recognising the threat, Google is trying hard to catch up, and today I first noticed results from Twitter showing up at or near the top of my Google results page. Indeed, it seems that Google has been integrating social media results since December, although today was the first time they showed up on my page (perhaps they have been rolling the feature out geographically, or else I hadn't typed in a search that would trigger the results). Yesterday's Telegraph reports that traffic to Twitter has increased noticeably since Google introduced this feature.

Here's what the results look like:

A post on the Socialtext blog claims that Google's dominance as the web's number one jumping-off point may be threatened not by another search engine, but by a wiki -- Wikipedia, no less.

Over time, Wikipedia has been slowly eating the entire Web's knowledge base until it becomes itself a faster, better, and--most critically--unspammed reference matter of what are the relevant and valuable resources. And unlike mere link directories, it doesn't simply list links, it tells a story about them.

Incidentally, a lot of search-engine watchers have noted that Wikipedia is dominating the SERPs. One says:

Personally I love it when I enter a query and a wikipedia entry appears in the results - I know, or at least believe, I have at least one good result. Which is precisely the opposite to how I feel when an About result appears, and both are often there together. In fact I often append the word 'wikipedia' to the end of a search if the original results don't look too promising.

Is this the sound of rumbling in the undergrowth? Probably not, but I continually remind myself that the Internet is still growing, and its change often comes from an unanticipated source.

I can't believe what I see today -- you can sign in for a "personalised" version of the Google homepage, that has weather forecasts (yes weather forecasts!) and news headlines.

Google's Our Philosophy page used to say, "Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat". This statement was recently removed.

I have hitherto said that Google "gets" the web; now I believe that it may be losing focus.

Google now has a blog search engine, devoted entirely to weblogs.

As with Google News, entries that are more recent are more likely to come up top.

Does this mean search results relating to blog entries will eventually be removed from the main index? That idea has certainly been touted in the past.

The PageRank indicator on the Google toolbar has been grayed out, for all sites, since late on May 27th. Is this going to be an end of a significant phase in Google's -- and the web's -- evolution? Or are they just working on it? Rumours abound...