Of all the people to come up with a search engine capable of catching Google I would not have bet on Kevin Rose. My money was on Joshua Schachter but he sold to soon and it now looks like delicious is doomed.
Rose gets what most other tech founders don’t: people matter more than machines. I think this comes from the fact that Rose is not a mathematician nor even a coder. Digg came from an insight he had into what people wanted – to see what other people liked and who was like them.
Algorithms are all well and good but all they can do is analyse what people have already done. Google does this by analysing the hierarchies created by website owners when they link to other pages. Digg can take this a step further by analysing the opinions of the people who read websites, not those who create them. In doing so you would create a better search engine than Google because the number of people who tag pages is greater than the number of people who create them.
People power
Here’s what it boils down to: is Digg’s army of users better than Google’s spider? I think the answer is yes. Rose explains:
We’re creating algorithms that take a look at what you’ve dug and compare it to other people, inside the system, in real time. We have this working on our staging servers right now – it’s not something that we’ve launched publicly – but essentially, when you Digg an item you’re agreeing with that item and all those other people who dug it. So let’s say you’re Digg number 4,000 on something: who are those other 3,999 people you agreed with? What we’re doing with the math behind the scenes is we’re saying ‘OK, you agree with all these other people, what else are they finding out there that you might like? That you might also find interesting? So we’re working on ways to surface those stories – to find quality content before it becomes popular – but also introduce you to new people based on what you’ve been Digging.
Yes! Thank you Kevin! This is what I wanted delicious to do, here’s what I said in my first post on this blog:
The beauty of delicious is that it can look into the mind of other people with similar interests to me, see what they have tagged and return more relevant results. Another advantage it has over Google is that delicious can also assess the strength of a link between me and another user by seeing how many times we have tagged the same page with the same tag.
All Yahoo has to do is analyse these links between users in the same way Google analyses links between pages and it will have a search engine which thinks differently and gives people a real reason to use Yahoo search over Google.
It doesn’t actually make much difference whether it is delicious or Digg. I think delicious is better because its easier to submit links but as it is stuck in Yahoo’s belly the chances of anything original happening with it are close to zero. So if Digg cracks it good luck to them. I don’t think they’ll end up with a social network but they might just crack a brilliant new search engine.
Read more:
On Yahoo
On Joshua Schachter
Pic: Laughing Squid
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