Information clustering social networks and search.

[kgun]

1. Background.

http://vivisimo.com/ is used by some companies in Norway. You can read more about the engine on the front page. If you put a search term like "social media" in the search field, you get the following message:

"Vivisimo Web Search is moving to http://clusty.com/ in 3 days"

with the following button

"Try Clusty Now."

If you hit that button, you will see a page that is divided in two parts

• Categories to the left.
• SERP to the right.

On the home page, Clusty the clustering search engine writes: "Clusty introduces Clustering 2.0". That may be interesting reading in itself. On the about Clusty page, you can read that Clusty is a meta search engine approach that helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom. In addition:

"Vivísimo was founded in 2000 by three Carnegie Mellon University scientists who decided to tackle the problem of information overload in web search. Rather than focusing just on search engine result ranking, we realized that grouping results into topics, or "clustering," made for better search and discovery. As search became a necessity for web users, Vivísimo developed a service robust enough to handle the variety of information the everyday web user was after. The result was Clusty: an innovative way to get more out of every search".


2. Search Summit Norway 08.

The third of april there shall be a Search Summit in Norway with participants from FAST, Intellisearch and Microsoft where it is claimed that we have build up a broad competence on search. On the agenda we can among other things read:

• "Will search become the new center of the enterprise computing universe? Sue Feldman, Research Vice President, IDC The last wave of enterprise technology tamed transactional computing. Now we are moving to interactive computing, and search is at the center of it."
• "The Evolving Dynamics of the 3D Web and Search: Chris Mahoney, Business Development Manager, Second Life - Linden Lab. With the Internet evolving to include virtual worlds, search will change too as the "third dimension" adds new characteristics to how users find things. Users will increasingly search for content on both the Web and "the Grid", as the future of each becomes more intertwined. For when users can navigate on X, Y, and Z axes, search must expand to include constantly changing 3D objects in a multidimensional world."

3. Social Bookmarking engines.

http://del.icio.us/ where I kbleivik's bookmarks on del.icio.us and other WPW members, e.g.:

• CTABUK's bookmarks on del.icio.us
• incrediblehelp's bookmarks on del.icio.us

is soon becoming the most popular social bookmarking site on the internet. Try to add Adobe and Sitepoint and you find the following bookmarks:

• adobe's bookmarks on del.icio.us
• sitepoint's bookmarks on del.icio.us

This drives traffic and the most aggressive marketers are LinkedIn: Relationships Matter on all bigger social networks. Today, while writing this post, I get an invitation to Windows Live SkyDrive where you get 5 Gb storage and can

• Store your own private files.
• Share files with friends.
• Share files with everybody.

All these networks have the potential to cluster information and target traffic to the participating members. Imagination is definitely more important than knowledge, and every digital good and service that can be shared has the potential to become the platform for a social network site. The sky is not the limit. The limit is 3D space, since space stations are already built and it is only time before man settle on the moon and planets.

How will this affect search?

4. Tags and Key Words.

Very much is about finding the right tags to put on social network and media sites. Finding the right categories and the right tags can be the difference between success and failure. Since so many of the same people are participating on the same networks, we will get a clustering of information and tags. The information that is collected and registered on these sites will of course be used as a basis for social network search engines sooner or later.

5. My experience told me a story.

Recently I rewrote http://www.digitalnorway.com/ completely. To find the latest information about Norway, I Googled: Norway. What surprised me was the many sites made by foreigners on Norway. For that reason I had to divide the site in three different parts:

1. Norwegian home page.
2. Regional Norway.
3. International.

If you navigate to the international sub page, you will find a lot of sites similar to Norway - the official site in the United States made by foreigners. A lot of these pages were high on the SERP's and seemingly written by Norwegians, if you did not dig deeper.

6. The quality and unbiasdness of search result.

Ideally the most relevant page should get the top position on the SERP's. But searh algorithmes is only objective in a mathematical sence and can be manipulated and lobbied like human beings. There will always be a race between companies and individuals striving to reach the top position.

"While that ultimate goal imagined by Wales for Wikipedia has not yet come to fruition, there is no questioning the breadth and usefulness of Wikipedia. Those who refused to believe that a user-generated encyclopedia could compete with the monolithic, traditional encyclopedia written by experts and organized by professional editors, were no doubt shocked when Nature magazine published a 2006 article comparing Wikipedia to the well-known Encyclopedia Britannica. The article concluded that Wikipedia articles were comparable in accuracy and thoroughness to those of the older, paper encyclopedia".

Source: Dick Clark (2007): Wikipedia: What Is It Good For? - Dick Clark - Mises Institute

7. Conclusion

We definitely live in a more and more exiting Cyber Space that is also becoming more 3-D in shape and where information and search results are pulled from high dimensional spaces where information may cluster to special parts of the space by social activity and human lobbying.