Branton Kenton-Dau on the Future of Search
This piece was written by Branton Kenton-Dau, the director of VortexDNA. It is the fourth installment in the Rising Star Dream Team Future of Search series.
A couple of days ago Kaila Colbin, VortexDNA’s dream blogger, asked me how I saw the future of search. I’m not the only one with a view on this and I hope you will make a contribution as well. I say that not just to be polite but because the one thing I have learnt since I last wrote about search is the power of mass collaboration.
Two weeks ago I bought a book called Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. William. On the flight back to New Zealand from San Francisco I read the first 100 pages (it had been a long week). It certainly changed - or rather confirmed - everything my awareness has been inching towards.
Mass Collaboration is the reason why Marc Andreessen can write:
No single closed service, no matter how good, and no matter how big, could compete with the diversity of thousands and then millions of web sites that were customized to every conceivable user interest and need.
However brilliant the engineers are at Google, or Hadar Shemtov and his Natural Language team at Yahoo! are (and they ARE BRILLIANT), there is no way of outsurpassing the creative brilliance of millions of people collaborating to create a better search.
When I read something I believe, there does not seem to be any point continuing in the old mode any longer. As soon as I got off the plane we opened up the next generation of the MyWebDNA browser extension to the world. If VortexDNA is in the market to provided a more relevant Web - a totally personalised Web - there is now in my mind only one way to make that happen - by harnessing you and me and you and you… Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia has known this for a long time. He has just recieved $10 million from Amazon to build the next search on these principles. I believe, any serious contender to be the next Google has to embrace the power of mass collaboration. To my mind there is no other way. What do you think?
