It took me a while to figure out my opinion, but several interesting articles got the stars aligned just right for a split second to make some sense (until some new developments will soon de-align them again ).

Take a deep breath. OK, here it comes:

Google+ is Google’s take on Social.

Yes, I know, who would have thought?…
It’s just that Google’s definition of Social is a bit different.

At Facebook (and really, for most of us), Social is about conversations with people you actually know.
At Google, Social is the new alias for Personalization.

It’s pretty simple: Google’s business model has always meant the more I know about you, the better I can monetize through more targeted ads. At first, it was all about the search engine being where you always start your surfing, and Google was well seated. As traffic to social networks grew, culminating with Facebook overtaking Google on March 2010, it became increasingly clear that a larger portion of our information starts being served to us from social networks. Google was left out.

Why was that so important? Google still had tons of searches, an ever-growing email market share, and successful news aggregation and rss reader, among other assets. That’s quite a lot to know about us, isn’t it?

It turned out that the missing link often was the starting point. You would learn about the new thing, the new trend, the new gadget you want to get, while you were out of Google’s reach. By the time you got into the Google web, you may have already got your mind set on what you want to get and even where, making the Google ads a lot less effective.

The Follow versus Friend model is also a huge issue. It means that G+ is about self-publishing and positioning yourself, and not about conversations. That suits Google very well, and is not just a differentiation from FB. This model drives you to follow based on interest, building an interest graph rather than a social graph, and being a lot more useful to profiling you than your social connections.

That interest graph, in turn, makes sure your first encounter with those things that make you tick is inside the Google web. It also links back well to the fine assets that Google holds today, from your docs to your publishing tools. So when Google News announces those funny badges, and you may have thought “Heh, who would want to put these stinking badges on their profiles…” – think again. Their private nature is just fine for Google. It’s a way to ask you to validate your inferred interests: “So tell us, is that interest of yours in US politics that we have inferred from your news reading a real inherent interest, or was it just a transient interest that will melt away after the election?“. Again – big difference for profiling.

Finally, Google+ is positioned to be a professional network. Focusing on interests and having anyone able to follow you, will keep away the teens and lure the self-proclaimed professionals. In that sense, LinkedIn may have more of a reason for concern, at least as the content network it now tries to be. It’s quite likely that G+ does not even aim to unseat Facebook, only to dry it out of its professional appeal, and leave it with what we started with – party/kids photos and keeping track of what those old friends are up to.

I guess I already know what network I’ll be posting a link to this post to…

Contrast this with Microsoft’s poor attempt at “social search” by indexing tweets and status messages and showing them regardless of the actual searcher (example search, you’ve got to be on “United States” locale on bing to see it).

Then also contrast it with Facebook’s announcement back in August of its implementation of searching within friends’ posts - a less grandiose announcement that yet delivered far more social experience than Bing’s. Nevertheless, it’s a very limited experience and far from being a true information source for any serious search need.

So how does Google overcome the main obstacle – collecting your connections?

Google relies on its own sources and on open sources it can obtain by crawling the social graph. That is the true reason why Facebook is not part of Google’s graph (no XFN/FOAF marking on Facebook’s public pages). Google may be counting on Facebook’s inevitable opening up, and with Gmail’s rising popularity it becomes a reasonable alternative even for Facebook users like me.

Sadly, all this great news gave zero credit to Delver, where it all happened first…

“Phone call for Al…Al Coholic…is there an Al Coholic here?”
“Wait a minute… Listen, you little yellow-bellied rat jackass, if I ever find out who you are, I’m gonna kill you!”

Sweet little Bart Simpson must have hacked his way into the training data the guys at Google Scholar are using. I was running a simple Google query for user manuals that Googlebot indexed at sears.com, and got these goodies in the results:

For the perplexed readers, the image on the right is what the Google Scholar parser saw for the DVD result (click to enlarge), then assumed it’s an academic paper and desperately tried to find an author name. As Google freely admits, “…Automated extraction of information from articles in diverse fields can be tricky”. Yep.

It gets even better: since there are many such “academic papers” with the same author name, Google clusters them together, even when the manuals are for different products. Try one of those “All xxx versions” links, e.g. this one, all by our good friend O. Instructions. Interested students are encouraged to proceed and find out the etymology of other fascinating author names such as R. Parts and NO. Model.

And what about our old friend Al Coholic, you ask? well, Google Scholar tells us he did actually publish something! but wait – 1877? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences? young Simpson, have you no shame boy!?

No, not Kumo. That’s Google’s recent launch, trying to compete with Twitter search (“Recent results”), to preempt Microsoft (clustering result types), to show a different, though quite ugly UI metaphor (“wonder wheel”), and generally to roll out a whole bunch of features that should have been Google Labs features before making (or not) their way into a public product. So what’s next? buttons next to search results moving them up or down with no opt-out?? Ah, wait, that waste of real estate is already there.

Someone is panicking. OPEN FIRE! ALL WEAPONS!!! DISPATCH WAR ROCKET AJAX!!! The same spirit that brought us the failure of knols, is bringing us yet further unnecessary novelty, but this time it’s a cacophony of features, each deserving a long Google Labs quarantine by itself.

I noticed that much of my recent blog posts have to do with Google criticism . I wrestle with that, there really ought to be more interesting stuff to blog about in the IR world, and there is also great stuff coming from Google (can you imagine the fantastic similar images feature is still in labs? can Google please apply this to the ridiculously useless “similar pages” link in main web search results??), but I truly think we see a trend. Google is dropping the ball, losing the clear and spotless logic we have seen in the past, and the sensible slow graduation of disruptive features from Google Labs. Sadly, though, it’s not clear if anyone is there, ready to pick that ball…

So Google must know this, as  Chrome does talk to the mothership quite often. Then why-oh-why, whenever Google embarks on a “Get Chrome” campaign and I happen to use IE (say for one of those sites that renders well only in IE), do they not spare us the converted? is it really that hard to put a flag on the Google uber-cookie that Chrome is already installed here?…

BTW – all you Firefox users are considered too sophisticated to buy it – this  promotion is not shown to FF users, only IE!

Now, it’s quite clear Google has to fight tons of spammers and SEO people who bomb them with automatic queries. But that’s what CAPTCHAs are for, isn’t it? well, for some reason Google often saves on them, and instead provides you with the excellent service of referral to CNET to get some antivirus software. Dumb.

The amazing part is that you can get this from a single, well-defined, world-peace-disrupting query, for allintitle:”design”. Booh!

The Germans were nearing exhaustion, they also began to recall Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. General Günther Blumentritt noted in his diary: “They remembered what happened to Napoleon’s Army. Most of them began to re-read Caulaincourt’s grim account of 1812. That had a weighty influence at this critical time in 1941. I can still see Von Kluge trudging through the mud from his sleeping quarters to his office and standing before the map with Caulaincourt’s book in his hand”

Only later did I consider searching, rather than going straight to Wikipedia. Surprisingly, there were quite a few quality articles in the top 10, so I tried to figure what inhibited my strong search habits. Two reasons came up -

1. Wikipedia’s mass of editors and strict adherence to NPOV, ensures me I’m not wasting my time on someone’s subjective view
2. Habit – I knew what coverage and scope to expect in Wikipedia

No wonder, then, that Google got concerned about this habit of visiting adsense-less, top search result pages, tried to tackle it with Google Knol, but failed. But then, revisiting my reason #1 above shows very clearly why the individualist knol concept will always fail against Wikipedia as an objective information source, no matter how much weight Google puts behind it. Someone’s hubris at Google followed in the footsteps of another Napoleon, too.

The dilemma between search and browse paradigms runs through many software user interfaces, and was especially emphasized with Google’s focus on search in their products. In some areas, such as finding web sites, the search paradigm has undisputably won and the once-king Yahoo! Directory barely has a stub article in Wikipedia. In others, such as news, search is a rarely used service, and a portal-like browse interface rules.

But in reality these are complementary paradigms, rather than competing. Browsing is excellent when the data fits a clear and sufficiently granular taxonomy, shared by the author and reader, and unstructured searching fits into all the other cases (and in some cases, like web search, that’s all there is). Oh, and one more difference: search is A LOT easier. Just stuff all the text into strong index machines, and give the user the ubiquitous search box.

With gmail I wouldn’t think twice before moving an email to the archive, I have no doubt I’ll find it when needed, and all the hassle of managing folders is gone. A blog is no different. You have an author communicating a heap of knowledge to readers, and instead of sorting it for future reference in tags and categories (the complete opposite of “…a clear and sufficiently granular taxonomy…“) they should be gmailized – stuff them in an index and search.

Ah, you say, just embed a blog search box. Sure, but I have dozens of blogs I want to search in. So use some blogs search aggregator, you suggest. But I don’t want to get results from all the blogs out there, just from those I care about. Well, then, guess you’ll need to build yourself a custom search… or just use Delver. Knowing that in a few years every major search engine will integrate social features, I can carelessly blog about anything my social circle could find useful (say, how to plug an mp3 player to the audio system of an Israeli leasing-level Ford Focus), without bothering about categorizing with the perfect keywords (hint: there aren’t any). In fact, I think I’ll skip categories altogether in this blog, and just use tags for a nifty tag cloud

(crossposted on the Delver Blog)