Former Google Exec: Traditional Search Market Shrinking

An anonymous reader writes "Former Google executive Stafford Masie believes that traditional search is dying because users are choosing to query their friends and followers on services like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Here's the quote from the video: 'The pie of search query volumes in the world – that business is shrinking. Why? Because people are going and doing search queries – search query volumes are moving towards social containers. They're moving away from static pages being searched and they're moving more towards dynamic real-time stream content. Like Twitter. Like Tumblr. Like Facebook. Those things have a better result because the penetration, the personalization associated with it, and the constant freshness of the content. So I believe that Google's search volume – the business Google is in on the search side – that business is shrinking. And they've got to do something about it.'"

step 3) profit

[alphatel]

Or maybe volume is shrinking because Google has gone from an actual search engine to a giant shopping, friendfinder, news aggregator and becoming less useful by the minute.

Um...

[thestudio_bob]

Maybe it's shrinking for Google, but maybe because more and more people are using alternatives. Like me.

And I want to go on record saying that the entire "Social Search" model is one of the stupidest ideas google has ever come up with. All of my friends and family have different career backgrounds and their own personal likes, when your using a search engine for reference, like for coding, my friend's FaceBook page is not going to help me out.

Topical sites cause traditional search to shrink

[Hentes]

Traditional search is shrinking (but, mind you, is far from dying) because of huge topical sites that finally managed to develop good search engines. It's far easier to search Wikipedia, IMDB or Youtube for whatever content you are looking for than shuffling through the results of Google that will take you to those sites anyway.

Re:step 3) profit

[Attila Dimedici]

Or maybe search volume is not actually shrinking. Relevant quote, "I believe that Google's search volume...that business is shrinking." Does he anywhere provide any evidence that what he believes is true? He mentions an anecdote about how he queried friends on social media when he was looking for a restaraunt, that is not evidence. That is opinion. If there is any solid evidence it is not mentioned in either of the articles linked in the summary. One can postulate all the reasons one likes as to why Google's search volume is shrinking, but first one needs to establish that it is, in fact, shrinking.

"Dying" is the King of bad metaphors.

[ugglybabee]

Every blip or countertrend will always be accompanied by some jackass on the internet explaining how some established paradigm is "dying". Usually, it's some tech blogger desperately trying to goad readers into clicking on his story by being provocative, and it's usually a loaded question, because actually saying what is implied is flat-out ridiculous. When Linux on the desktop finally reaches two per cent. Some jackass will post a blog with the title "IS MICROSOFT DYING?" It's really really really overdone, especially when you consider that it's nonsense. Dying means that Death is imminent, and death is nonexistence. You could argue that nothing that isn't a life form can die in the first place, and you'd usually be right. People are still putting on Greek tragedies. Indeed, somebody somewhere is probably WRITING a Greek tragedy. So Greek Tragedy is not dead. It's not even dying. And "traditional internet search"? Hell, that doesn't make any sense either. Has the web been around long enough that anything about it can be considered "traditional"? Besides bullshit, I mean.

Re:Oh really?

[Svartalf]

Facebook? Really? Faceplant's nothing more than a batch of people doing a "dig-me" thing on the Internet- and I'm one of it's users.

I wouldn't have even thought about looking for plumbers via Faceplant. Most of my associates (and I can heartily assure you that most of them aren't as computer savvy as I am...) on Facebook wouldn't have thought of looking for a plumber by asking a question of their friends like that. They'd have let their fingers do the walking in the yellow pages, meatspace or online. Sorry, not buying it.