Let’s Talk Knowledge

A lot has been happening recently in the realm of Social. Major announcements from Twitter and Facebook over the past two weeks are sure to have implications beyond what we can conceive right now. The popularity of the two sites alone are growing in unheard of percentages with a combined user base of over 500 million.

One of the most interesting things that is happening as a result of this is how traffic is being directed on the web. More and more these social networking sights are actually driving traffic to major web properties. In the case of USA Today for example, social networking sites are in fact driving 6X more traffic than Google (full report from Gigya can be found here http://bit.ly/c8HLDA – free registration required).

I think this is actually a beginning of a fundamental shift in the way people discover and navigate information. Rather than relying on an empty search box to direct you, people are relying on their friends, colleagues, and other experts to guide them. This really shouldn’t be surprising. Before Google convinced us all that search was the best way to get to the information you need, we all relied on our networks much more heavily in order to gather and analyze information. If you were looking for competitive intelligence, the first thing you’d do is pick up the phone and talk to a sales rep, or a customer, or an industry analyst (not saying you CI professionals don’t still do this btw!).

But Search seemed so convenient. It was always there, and easy to use. People could be more self-reliant. In some ways, Search was an improvement. But the reality is that Search is also very inefficient. Depending on the research you look at, we see that people using web search engines fail to find what they are looking for anywhere from one-third to one-half of the time. But as the amount of information online became more and more vast, it seemed like Search was the only solution. The reality is we search because we have to, not because we want to.

Until the rise of the social networks. Easy to use and prolific, these sites are helping turn the web from a network of documents, to a platform that connects people. And a platform that not only connects people, but removes the friction involved with communication between people.

Now we are starting to see the beginning of how these social networks can be so much more than Search. Need to find something, as your network. Chances are someone you know has had the same or similar question and can guide you to their research or even analysis. Not sure what you are looking for, let your trusted network of experts tell you what is important around any given topic. This is why these sites are beginning to overtake Search when it comes to directing traffic online.

There is a lot more to discuss and understand about this topic. This post could get very lengthy if I tried to even scratch the surface. I’ll leave you with this thought though. Search will have a place for many years to come of course. However sooner rather than later, our ability to find the information we need will be more influenced by the power and reach of our networks, than our ability to craft elegant queries for the big white search box.

My advice to anyone today is to begin to understand these new tools and platforms. And to more importantly begin to build your networks on them. The investment you make today will be well rewarded in the near future. IMHO

- Ken

I promise, this is not another post about Bing, and everything it may or may not do to change the consumer search engine landscape, and related advertising industry. If you are looking for that, take a look at a very concise and relevant Forrester blog post here. I do want to talk about one of the principles that Bing is focusing on in an attempt to differentiate.

You can find it in the url of the introductory video for Bing: http://www.decisionengine.com/. Decision Engine. The point being that search is not an objective, it is a task that is employed by most people in an effort to make a decision. That is a bit of a no brainer, but a really important distinction (and I think MS is going to spend close to 100M in advertising to bring that to light). As a technology community we have just been to in love with making search better in the past 10 years. We need to change the focus to improving our efficiency in making decisions. Again, I know it sounds like a subtle distinction, but it is anything but subtle.

For example, if I am focused on making search better, I look at things like relevance of results to the keyword in use, speed of results, breadth of coverage,  autocomplete, etc. If I think about improving the decision making process, I try to understand what decisions are being made, why, and when? What data elements and information is required to make that decision, what is the best resource to get that information, who is the best person to talk to? Really, a very different viewpoint from a requirements perspective.

I often refer to the process to support decision making in business as business research (of which search is one of the tasks in that process of course, among others like analysis). So for people interested in business research Bing is important. First, even if only because of the huge advertising budget MS has, it will help shift the technology communities focus from search, to research. Second, I think it will help validate the importance of the decision making tools – something that can sometimes be hard to do believe it or not (how many of you have management or users that think your existing decision making tools like Factiva are nothing more than a search box and bunch of articles?). Last, because of the importance based on Social Intelligence (Bing organizes content based on what other users have found to be important). 

So while it remains to be seen whether it is a good tool or not, whether it will help MS gain some share in the consumer “search” market, and if it will bring a shift from keyword to display advertising, Bing is important – thanks Microsoft.

- Ken

I’ve been playing around with Kosmix.com this morning to do some research for work. Of course I know Factiva is the ultimate online research tool for knowledge workers like myself (that is probably as far as anyone from Dow Jones will read, so I’ll be objective from now on). However, I wanted to try an actual project with Kosmix to put it through its paces.

My overall impression of the site is pretty favorable. I like the layout of the site, and the natural grouping of different content types. I especially like the inclusion of social media, and even found some of the most useful information, or links to it in that section of the search results (social intelligence anyone?).  The site did an ok job at clustering and establishing some basic relationships for some, but not all of my searches (this seemed to happen when my query was very specific, so I imagine there was not enough volume of results to do so). I was disappointed by the lack of any extraction capabilities (identifying companies, or products, or people for example) and visualizations.

Kosmix did a fair job of helping guide me through my research, I didn’t have to run more searches to navigate to related information. Though I did not try Right Health, a vertical search portal built on the Kosmix platform, I can see where the platform would be well suited for that.

However navigation and understanding is where I think all of our interfaces for research can improve, and certainly Kosmix has a fair way to go here. I mentioned the lack of entity extraction earlier, and that is really a pre-requisite for the ability to do this well. For example I was researching a particular category of software tools, and while company names appeared in many of the results and categories, they were never identified as a company, and linked to any relevant company information (fundamentals, business events, etc) and this caused more searching and extra time on my part to get these details.

Finally while the site was visually pleasing, there were no visualizations that really helped me understand the information. Again this is an area where many of our research tools can improve, and an area I think we have the technology and resource to invest in but I’m just not seeing a great deal of it.

Ok, now back to Factiva to finish my research (in case someone from DJ did actually read this far..).

- Ken