The Search for the Secret Sauce

Most internet users don’t remember a time before there was a Google. (Those who do likely were grimacing over my failure to capitalize Internet.) For those who made surfing a dry activity since 2000, there has always been an Algorithm in the background, providing order to the vast online Universe.

What Google did was promote the idea that an unseen formula could improve your search results. Human-inspired and seeded indexes could not scale to cover the exponentially-growing feed of data – and we needed a Secret Sauce to sort it all out.
The Search for the Secret Sauce
Unlike Coca-Cola, that recipe has been in a state of constant evolution. As soon as the formula for “winning” search gets gamed, it’s time to level the playing (paying?) field again, to bring users the most relevant and actionable results. We were comfortable with the Secret Sauce, and didn’t really notice a change in the flavor of the results even as the ingredients were being tweaked.

A New Menu

I’ve long contended that were are on the cusp of a new Age of Information.

The era of the simple algorithm is on the way out, as we turn to social networks to bring us relevant answers from people we trust.

As I worked on the slide outlining my theory, my wife gave me two concrete examples of questions she put to her friends instead of Google:

• “Where can I get a cute haircut and style?”
• “How can you get the smell of vomit out of the back of the car?”

Relevance used to be a universal. One Algorithm to Rule them All.

Now it’s individual. My results are going to be necessarily different from yours.

The Race Is On

Much has been made of the jockeying among Google, Facebook and Microsoft to find the sweet spot. Facebook is owning social, and is rapidly becoming a target for search optimizations. Google has tried and sputtered in efforts to compete in the social arena, because it sees that door as one that preempts the desire to go to a separate search page (like my wife did, at least twice.)

Google may be tipping its hand toward its development of the Killer Relevance Feature. In September 2010, Google will roll out a feature that allows you to create a Priority Inbox. It’s an automated feature that programs itself based on your habits.

Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google’s Enterprise unit, sees Priority Inbox as a sort of inverted spam filter which, instead of blocking and setting aside unsolicited messages, prioritizes items in the inbox so that users can attend more quickly to the most important e-mails.

“If you’re in meetings and you come back to your e-mail and you have five minutes between appointments and you have 50 e-mails, which five messages do you spend your time on in that window of time?” Glotzbach said. Priority Inbox aims to automate that and simplify that decision, he said.

The more you use it, the more you are telling Google who you respond to, who you don’t, and what sorts of topics are likely to demand your immediate attention.

But what the heck does that have to do with creating a social network?

Everything. And nothing.

The key to delivering pertinent results to you is to know enough about what you’ve clicked on quickly and what you’ve deleted without looking. Knowing what you respond to, and what you let linger in the inbox. Knowing what you’ve opted into, and that conversations you initiated are likely more important to you that ones that came to you cold.

That’s something that Google can do that Facebook can’t. Facebook is tracking which people you are Liking and Clicking and Commenting, and is silently ratcheting up what it’s doing to improve “background relevance.” Yet it’s all within Facebook’s domain. Google is quietly letting its users opt-in to providing the same sort of information, but in the web as a whole. Google’s best chance at competing with Facebook for “social” is to turn the rest of the internet into its Social Hub. Compete, by not competing.

Putting the ME in GoogleMe

Whatever GoogleMe ends up resembling, it will be informed with a variety of data from the rest of the GoogleVerse, designed to make the experience less noisy than even Facebook. It will “play” with people who aren’t in that direct mutual opt-in relationship that makes Facebook work.

Think of this “Priority Inbox” as a test run of the Secret Sauce for GoogleMe. A way for Google to figure out how to tweak that algorithm, so that when the true Facebook competitor launches, it will have a better experience lined up out of the gate. The failures of Buzz and Wave were failures of network. You needed your friends there for it to mean anything — and your friends are already in your email.