Om Malik on Broadband : People Power Vs Google - actively weaving your web
January 7th, 2006 by Jean Sini
Great article by Om on how socially mediated information will help create much more targeted and appropriate search results, and the players in that market.
Google does an excellent job of figuring out what is relevant for an “average user” aggregating over search and find behaviors of masses of participants. A number of companies are attempting to take such search results and rerank them by an appropriateness measure dependent on the sentiments of ones own social group. We definitely feel that just letting people rank stuff is not going to do a lot better than observing their linking and reading behavior, but that giving different results depending on what your affinity group might be is where the promise lies.
At activeweave, we’re taking a different approach to addressing a part of this challenge. What activeweave does has been called the searchless find, which is close to what Eric Schmidt has stated as a vision for google’s offerings: tell me what I want. Activeweave isn’t intended to replace search, but is an additional tool complementing it, bringing you results about what you care about on the web by who you care about, either personally, socially, or even commercially, with powerful tools for defining and controlling what information reaches you.
In the spirit of what we’ve taken to calling the next web, a personalized and socialized view of the entire web, we are releasing early and often; fresh on the heels of our initial private alpha, we’re busy over the holidays baking a rev, something a bit less raw and a bit less private!
Feel free to sign up if you’d like us to ping you when it’s time to play with a brand new way of interacting with the web.