To test Robert's theory and to offer some belated support to his Google killers, we're going to get this party started with the story of a little Korean website that could.
Outside of its native country, there are few people who have heard of Naver, a Korean web portal that launched back in June of 1999. Despite the presence of Yahoo, Google and rival Korean search engines, today Naver is the undisputed king of Korean search, enjoying +1 billion daily page views and an astonishing +77% search market share. Naver is a David and Goliath story well worth studying and there are bloggers better qualified to talk about the history of Korean search so to cut a long story short, a significant part of Naver's success is derived from two services.
1. Knowledge iN is a 'knowledge search' service - essentially the Korean version of Yahoo! Answers but predating Y! Answers by three years. Users ask questions and other users that answer are rewarded with 'knowledge points'. Its database of over 75 million articles is 10 times the size of the entire Wikipedia database.
2. Integrated search service - there's no doubt South Korea is switched on, boasting an incredibly high broadband penetration rate and a very sophisticated online userbase. However, even Google is irrelevant when there are no documents for Googlebot to crawl and index. Back in the early days of the Korean Internet, there simply were not enough Korean language documents to answer queries so Naver began paying content providers a fee to create a walled garden of content. Seven years before Google or Ask's universal search, Naver was already algorithmically serving up a mash-up of search results from their bucket of 'collection' databases.
Korean web 2.0 observer Chang-Won Kim believes Naver has created a benevolent cycle. Naver, as the go-to guy for both user aggregated content and vendor aggregated content, has made it seamless and natural for South Korean content providers to place all their content on the site.
What can we learn from the South Korean search industry?
Yahoo! In Pole Position For Once?
When Yahoo! Answers launched in December 2005, few analysts foresaw the upside in a Q+A service that tapped into Yahoo's almost half a billion global users. Within two years, Y! Answers has accumulated over 95 million registered users and is one of a few good news stories to come out of Yahoo on a quarterly basis.
Let's not beat around the bush. Like Naver, Yahoo has the 'ecosystem' to make knowledge search THE search experience that online users are looking for. Mahalo provides hand-picked results from a small team of writers, Yahoo Answers provides hand-picked answers from millions of users. Which place would you turn to first, especially if such a search were already seamlessly embedded into your social network (hi Yahoo! 360)? Figure out how to best mash-up Yahoo Answers into Yahoo! Alpha, take it mobile with Yahoo! oneSearch, and we might just have the Naver of the Western world.
Facebook Could Really
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Okay, snap back to reality.
Yahoo! has thus far sucked at integrating their myriad properties and we also know that Yahoo! 360 hasn't really taken off.
Q+A is a social network. People ask questions and other people answer. At 45 million users, Facebook is a social network that has a critical mass of answerers. While Facebook already has question apps (eg. Slide's My Questions), we're talking about taking it to the next social level where Q+A becomes search.
Picture this - a large search box at the very top of every Facebook page.
Type in a query into the box and you'd be taken to Facebook's very own database of answers (aka search results).
If the database does not provide an appropriate answer to your question, hit the submit button to make your query public and wait for Facebook users to provide the best answer. For example, if you chose to follow a particular category like 'animated movies', you'd be able to see new 'animated movie' questions in your Facebook news feed...
Could you see a better way to procrastinate on Facebook than to help fellow Facebook users while earning yourself some glory?
Facebook's fantastic usability (compared to existing social networks) is a clear reason why they could very quickly own this space despite Yahoo's huge head start and Google's intention to free the 'social graph'. A Q+A service would also mesh well with Facebook's current walled garden philosophy...but the only problem is, and it's a big one, without the benefit of Naver/Google-style content databases, Facebook users would still be relying on Google or another search engine to help reference their answers.
Where does this leave us?
Kill Nothing But Time
Is Facebook an actual Google killer or just an accomplice?
Is Google the next Google killer?
Will Yahoo turn around 360 and make Yahoo! Answers the way to search?
The answer is no current social network has the complete package required to replace Google:
Reach & Scalability = ability to answer long tail questions and provide fast response times.
Usability = robust spam/moderation, ease of contribution.
- Google has search databases (blog, book, maps, video, etc.)
- Facebook has social usability (and ability to wall-in content)
- Yahoo has Y! Answers and, unlike Google, a web portal presence
- Ask used to have Jeeves' answering service (and Google had Google Q+A), but it did not scale well
Think of it this way - today's search engines answer three basic questions:
1. Transactional questions: "Where can I buy the latest Buffy figurines?"
2. Navigational questions: "How do I get to the Toys R Us website?"
3. Informational questions: "What are the operating hours for toy stores in Seattle?"
But there is one type of question that they can not answer.
As Yahoo's Bradley Horowitz said,
"Yet there is a subtle but profound limitation to “web search” as currently realized: search engines can only return results that… well… you know… exist."
Surely a searchable social network-based Q+A service would be able to answer all four types of questions?
Any Questions?
Interesting article shor. You bring up some great points. Predicting who will be the next big thing is always an exciting topic.I believe the best chance Facebook has to take it to the next level is by looking to the internet's first killer app, e-mail. Microsoft and Facebook have already made it public knowledge that they are working together. Both companies have been trying to own the system people use to control their online identities for years (Think Microsoft's passport and Facebook's walled garden) I think the next logical step would be integrating an improved hotmail module directly into Facebook. With Facebook gaining a real e-mail platform it could really become an one stop shop for students and older demographics alike. Mark Zuckerberg is a very smart guy, I just hope his rapid success and reluctance to work with Microsoft (and vice versa with Steve Balmer's recent comment) doesn't sink his business. As I do more research on my idea I will try to follow up with a blog post.
Its a good idea - one of the recent improvements that FB introduced was the ability to email people directly from your FB account....without them needing an account.
Danny Dover,
You must be the new guy? Nice to meet you and all that.
Seconded!
willcritchlow and DrDave,
Happy to be here and meet you and the rest of the great community. Thanks for the support and look forward to hearing your continued input!
Also, funny to see my name is often said in full online as it is offline. None of that first name only nonsense for me.
Further reading material: Two blogs I want to thank for their insight into the hyper-evolved Korean search industry: KoreaCrunch: Channy Yun talks about Naver Search Integration.Web 2.0 Asia: Chang-Won Kim reveals Naver's path to success.Eric Enge's recent interview with Yahoo's Tim Mayer on Universal search (and Yahoo Answers)LinkedIn has its own Q+A section but thanks to their corporate demographic. it's a highly restricted service.
Lucas - you can feel free to put additional reading materials like this in the post itself :)
BTW - I think this is a fantastic post. Rarely have I come across an example of someone who has a real argument about how Google could be overtaken, but I think your example with Naver shows, at the very least, how search and content might evolve on the web.
Even if Google isn't "beaten" per se by social content and social communities, the success of programs like Facebook & Y! Answers shows us that the phenomenon isn't limited to specific countries or cultures, but has a broad appeal.
Heck, even SEOmoz has a popular Q+A (coming up on 500 public entries) :)
shor: Thank you for a nice article, I've enjoyed reading it very much.
Shoe: Google makes money on advertising so long as they control big chunks (or majority as with search) of the platforms and technologies through which people consume queries to get their information fix. I doubt Shor is trying to argue that Google is the same product as one of these, or that it makes money in a different way other than ads - only that there are others who are trying to catch up with competing, different kind of animal platforms, where people get their information.
When people potentially go to a non-Google platform to get it, obviously Google doesn't make money on advertising there. If Google slips and sits on its hands while some of these platforms are allowed to grow to critical capacity (not saying that they are sitting on their hands necessarily) then they start to loose a big chunk of revenue.
If searches don't get cleaned up with all the seo'd spam out there, it is not IMO too far fetched to imagine people going to some popular Q&A social network platform and putting in queries such as "college scholarships site?", "cheapest ringtones network?" or whatever and wait a few minutes for answers instead of trying to sort through spammy search engine results which get returned for some niches. ALTHOUGH, with that said I wonder how much and when will the SEO game also turn to trolling Q&A networks to make sure that the answers which get returned are really for their clients' sites :) We'll be back to the same old circle.
Personally I am quite fascinated with Q&A stuff so you can call me biased as I am gearing up to launch a new startup in this space soon. In the meantime, the more the merrier of course.
Ari - fascinating to hear your perspective on this. I do wonder, though, if we really could train the world's Internet users to go to a different service when seeking things that might have high monetary commercial value and thus be open to spam. I'm also leery of underestimating Google's long term abilities to fight spam, particularly for high search volume queries (though certainly current searches for "buy viagra" or "mortgage rates in XYZ" would indicate they haven't had that success yet).
Hey Shor,
The naver stuff is interesting, but as you mention it came at a point where there was very little alternative information available. Naver had it's moment, gained critical mass and flew! Yahoo Answers must compete with an avalanche of alternative authorities like the wikipedia or the New York Times.
Facebook makes me laugh. How long will teens hang out on it now their parents have joined? More to the point, how would the q&a thing work with such transparency. Woud you like your friends to know about your recent query on genital warts or gambling addiction?
James
hmm... I agree with one of you comments here, the Qand A would be problematic if they become part of the feed, or if your friends can find out what you asked...thats not to say the Qand A cant grow, but some serious or embarrassing problems would never be asked...
As for the user demoghraphics on FB - to be honest it was never aimed at teens - although that portion did make up a huge proportion of the user base. But it has now levereged itself to the 25-34 gap by default...
As in the case of all services, effectively blocking spam or commercial entries would be the key here. I don't know about Yahoo Answers, but Naver Knowledge iN has fair amount of commercial content - for example, if I ask a question on used car, then some of the answers are likely given by used car salespeople. Well, some might ask if the content is useful, even an answer by a used car salesman can work, but when there's a mobile phone number of that used salesman given at the end of the answer... it wouldn't be difficult to call the answer not-commercial. Using human effort, even community efforts such as "report spam" features, inevitably hits a scalability wall. There should be some kind of inherent anti-spam, anti-commercial content mechanism on this Q&A system. Otherwise, it won't be too long before we see commercial content disguised as kind help.
Thanks for stopping by Chang!
I think when you reach a critical mass of self-moderating users and give them the right set of tools, spam can be dealt with fairly easily. I can see where disguised content with commercial intent is a little trickier - what if an endorsement is chosen as the best answer?
One question I didn't get around to asking - do you how does Naver monetizes their Knowledge iN service? I see traditional display advertising but no contextual advertising?
Excellent post shor!
Great point shor. At the end of the day Google does not own any content with exceptin to YouTube which in itself a legal liability. Google b-model is very hard to sustain escpcially when now Genie is out the bottle. Being just portal did not help it's predecessors.
Now, I do not think Google can afford to become facebook either (ie a close comunity)
I am sure the guys from google are paying attention now.
Update:
Comscore reports that Naver is the world's 5th largest search provider:
"According to comScore's qSearch 2.0 service, more than 37 billion searches worldwide went through Google in August. That's about 60 percent of all searches, higher than Google's 50 percent in the United States.
Yahoo Inc. was second worldwide with 8.5 billion, followed by Baidu at 3.3 billion, Microsoft Corp. at 2.2 billion and NHN at 2 billion."
Via: Web 2.0 Asia
I still think Google would return better Yahoo Answers! results than Yahoo! :)
I agree this Q&A things only kill time. Google and Facebook can not be compared. Google have hell of the contents blogs, websites even Q&A pages themselves stored to be shown and those Q&A have certain things written by certain number of users.
Youdaman, shor! Another great post. Even if your "prediction" doesn't come to fruition, you're thinking outside the box that other posts & articles with the same headline are stuck in.
Will Answers plus social network juice, blended together in a kind of buzzword consume with hype sauce, replace search engnes?
No.
YAHOO used to be an acronym for Yet Another Human Organized Ontology. They already tried it, failed it, and proved that computers do it better.
I would have probably been more interested in this post if it did not start out as "im writing this post cause robert scoble said it would get more attetion doing it this way"
cmon... =P
use your head... do you think Google and facebook are competing products? no... Google #1 is a advertising network (check there revenue stats).
Its like saying Digg is the Google killer...
Google will still make money on advertising (which is there core product, not the search engine) on all these sites if they want to sign them.
Shh. I got all excited about this blog post until I got down to the bit about Facebook and realized I had to rewrite the paragraph heading.
A cynical person would say that Google's upcoming 'free the social graph' strategy should read "free the social graph and put Adsense on each network'.
Jeremy - if Google suddenly stopped becoming the only place for answers to questions, it would follow that the ad business could falter as well. They've been very smart to build AdSense, as the display ad business could bring great income even if their searches fell off, but that doesn't mean they're immune to competition.
use your head... do you think Google and facebook are competing products? no... Google #1 is a advertising network (check there revenue stats).
Google will still make money on advertising (which is there core product, not the search engine) on all these sites if they want to sign them.
I am afraid I dont agree with these statements.
Lets look at the first statement. Google is the no1 advertising network - yes agreed - but are facebook and google competing? Of course. They both want share of advertising revenue, and spenders dont care about the core product, they just want to advertise in spaces where there are large numbers of users who convert well. In some cases, Facebook fails to supply the correct advertising product, because its adverts are not as targetted as googles are, and get it wrong as a result. But if Facebook improved its targeting mechanisms, it could very well hurt G, especially if it introduces its own search, with text adverts - who knows whether they will. But the reality is, both want advertisers to spend money with them.
The second statement, google...advertising...core product. Realy? Googles core commercial product is advertising, but its core product is Search. Without search, google cannot drive that many users to its site, and as a result would be useless as an advertising mechanism.
Why would you advertise with a site that doesnt offer anything? Googles not a portal like Yahoo! - it does not have any content of its own except for help documents. This would have an impact on its adsense as well - people sign into to adwords for the core engine first, and content second.
So where would G be without search?
iGoogle is certainly a portal, and for users who use it heavily, it represents quite a lot of inertia against having any other search service at the top of the home page. Search may be Google's core product, (although that is certainly arguable) but they are doing a good job of enticing users into relying on their peripheral products also. All of that helps to cement customer loyalty - thus boosting ad revenue.
BTW, $600 / share! Don't you wish you had seen that coming 5 years ago!
Point taken - but iGoogle isnt a true portal the way Yahoo is - again the content is purely third part, and based on your personal settings as opposed to prepopulated content such as Yahoo!.
I do like your comment on the fact that Google easily converts users to their new products, and some of these are far from the search product, e.g google docs...
But my argument here was that without the huge reliance on search, G would have been hard pushed to sell its media capabilities..
I may be wrong though...lol.
No, you're not. I totaly agree. Search was the right product in the right place at the right time for the Googlemeisters.
Very interesting case study Shor - thanks. The experiences of South Korea are worth watching - as one of the most connected parts of the world, it is interesting to think about whether we will go where they have gone or learn lessons from their experiences and go somewhere else. Especially in the mobile world.
Hey Will,
I believe I met your brother a couple of weeks ago in manchester. He's so enthusiastic about seo - he took on a black hat over his shady practices across a plate of noodles!
Hi James. Yes - Tom was there at the Manchester meet-up. He's head of search marketing at my company, Distilled. Whitest of white, of course ;)
Some interesting points here shor, but none that convince me I'm afraid. I don't know what the Google killer will be, but I'm not sure it's answers.
And if it is, I find that Google does a pretty good job of retrieving those answers already on the web. For instance, the other day I had a problem with my car. A quick Google later and I've found a Mazda forum, with guides in PDF form etc...
I'm sure that Google won't be top for ever, but I think the killer will be something that's not out there yet...
Obviously Yahoo Answers, or Facebook, is not just going to match Google. I think the idea is to think of all these things, be it Yahoo, FB, Mahalo, MySpace, Digg, Ning, etc as *platform verticals*. Google is the king of a few major verticals, but there are others growing. All I am saying is that immagine over the next 5-10 years we'll be seeing a lot of platform verticals hunting for people's attention - you can say for the moment even FB has a lot of attention. Every one of them is trying to chip away at Google's dominance. So IF and only If Google slips up in a considerable amount of these important verticals, which of course in itself is highly unlikely, it is possible it's going to hurt them.