This morning I typed into Google the search term: VoIP (which stands for Voice over Internet Protocol) and I got 64 Million responses. 64 Million!! How archaic is that?


Does Google have any idea how long would it take me to go through 64 Million responses? One day we are going to look back at the days of searching and getting 64 Million responses to anything and equate that to a Commodore 64 or Betamax tape.
I know, I know the point is Google is trying to bring me the best responses to the term in the first few pages (if not the first page). But the best responses according to who? Why don't they know I work at Avaya (who sells products and services in the VoIP space) and therefore I most likely have a very different mission in typing in VoIP?
Microsoft just launched Bing a new search service which is supposed to rival that of Google. To me it looks like Google but in a new wrapper with a few enhancements. This post is not an indictment of Bing, my point is they didn't take it far enough.
Someone can (and will) connect search to my social profile (say on Facebook) thereby making a truly intelligent search engine that will know where I work, and who my friends are. Then when I Google a term like VoIP .... it will know I work for Avaya, it will know my friends and can present me with a way to filter the web based on my social profile .... call it Social Search.
Then I will be able to narrow down a search for VoIP down in seconds based on the company I work for, members of my marketing team, friends I have in my network and get a completely different view of the internet that I can't get now.
24 months from now Social Search should be common place .... we should see social tools like Facebook Connect or OpenID which are already out there, used for search. I feel everyone wants to make the search market more competitive (right now Google has 87% of the US marketing and 90% of the European market) so perhaps Yahoo or AOL can revive their search business by going Social!
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