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Deep Search Thoughts...Fresh is the New Stale!
Howard Lindzon
October 04, 2009
I buy a lot of raspberries.
Love my raspberries.
I like ’em on cereal, ice cream, yogurt, right out of the container, you name it. The only thing that matters is that they are as fresh as can be.
In the web world today, if it ain’t fresh, than you are perceived to be in trouble. Even $GOOG is feeling the media heat.
The trader in me says that trade is fadeable, especially after the $100 million raise by Twitter ( $TWIT ). Though I think $GOOG should buy Twitter and could easily pay what it takes, I can understand the hesitation. There is a great chess game going on in the big leagues of search, news, and social media and I don’t think anyone knows who the ‘KING’ will be 5 years out (I would still bet on $GOOG).
I was reading this article/interview with a Google Search guy Amit Singhal and I liked what he had to say , especially:
Freshness has been a focus for awhile. There are lots of things that we are working on. We are deeply aware of the potential and the challenges in real-time search.
It’s not just Twitter. It’s all of the stuff being updated on a real-time basis. Twitter is a great service. But when it comes to information and information needs for users, the quality of content is critical. Someone who has put thought and hours into writing a story about Google and someone [else] comes along and says either Google’s great or Google sucks in three words. Just because something was said 20 seconds ago doesn’t quite make it something we should put in front of our users.
Not to say someone couldn’t say something important in the last 20 seconds. And that’s where our years of experience with crawling, indexing, and relevance comes in.
In the financial world it has almost always been freshest is best. Information is money.
That will never change in trading and is one of the reasons that Stocktwits appeals so much to traders – stocks, futures, currencies etc…
But the best traders I know and those that seem to make the most money long-term can blend fresh with stale. They can look out and look back.
It will be the same way with search.
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