Thinkcorps

[I tend to have these thoughts on Sunday mornings over coffee and reading NYTimes, blogs, etc. They come in no particular order—it’s not like I’m a paid analyst or anything. That’s a simple disclaimer for those of you thinking, yeah, so I read this 6 months ago. Anyway, it’s my blog, I’ll write what I want.]

I’m reading this NYT article about Google’s competitors in search, in which the writer completely mischaracterizes how Google makes its money (text ads on search, not search alone). After reading about Mahalo, I finally go check it out. the human-edited pages are interesting, though I wonder how easily it scales up and over time (updating already-created pages)—the iPhone page will have to be updated when v2 comes out; Paris Hilton’s page could need refreshing every week. I already pointed out this problem with Shopwiki.

I must note, it appears that Shopwiki is now a price-comparison search engine (with google ads down the side). The wiki section is only accessible via a link in the header. So much for the revolution.

So, anyway, YouTube. Mahalo’s human-edited pages group interesting results under topics (news, reviews, humor, video, etc.). And it occurs to me that the video search engine never really took off. Probably because while video is difficult to find (masked within flash players as it usually is), when you’re executing a new search, you have no idea what’s out there. It’s not obvious beforehand that any interesting video exists, and that you should be using a video search tool.

YouTube = Video Search

What YouTube did was essentially offer video search to the world (Google Video tried). But instead of some fancy algorithm, YouTube brute forced the issue, turning video uploading into a fun game you could play with friends. Now, instead of searching the Web for video, you could simply search YouTube—it was all there.

By involving users, YouTube helped change our mental model of search and the Web. Soon, we started thinking: “Hey, I wonder if that clip made it onto YouTube.” And of course, it usually had.

Google video failed because while technically spot-on, it wasn’t fun. It didn’t help users help themselves, in changing their expectations about online video.

iTunes is now the number 3 music seller because Apple built an end-to-end experience that people could get into and enjoy. We didn’t need to be able to buy songs and albums online, but Apple showed us it was fun and cool and better.

For YouTube, fancy algorithms went out the window. Why try searching for a needle in a massive, growing haystack? Because YouTube made video fun and sharable, users uploaded it by the truckload. Most of it is crap, sure, but lots isn’t. And who cares anyway? It’s 100% video content! All Youtube is burdened with is data storage, which is probably the cheapest of all the Web app-related burdens to bear.

I suppose that some time soon, search algorithms and/or our CMSs will get smart enough to parse out video from regular web pages, though with the proliferation of video playing widgets out there, I’m not entirely sure.

What I do know is that an algorithm can never change a person’s mind.