User Generated Search Results
We live in a world where user-generated content (UGC) powers a lot of internet behemoths. Facebook is entirely composed of user-generated posts. Remove those posts and all you will see are advertisements. YouTube’s meteoric growth was exclusively driven by user-generated videos and most of its views today are derived from users (as opposed to studios or video professionals). Etsy’s platform is user-created crafts, and Yelp and Trip Advisor are largely composed of user-generated reviews of restaurants and travel destinations. In fact, much of our internet consumption is from sources that can be readily defined as user-generated, including the Medium platform. The one exception is internet search where the content is produced by an algorithm and UGC does not exist.
Before diving in to what we mean by user generated search results, let’s define “user-generated”. For one, to state the obvious, it is created and published by a user, as opposed to a professional. An easy distinction is Yelp, where the reviews are written by users who (presumably) have eaten at the restaurant, as opposed to reviews written by professional food critics like Jonathan Gold of the LA Times or Pete Wells of The New York Times. A search on Yelp for Lord Stanley in San Francisco will show (as of July, 2017) 156 reviews. This is user-generated content. The review of the restaurant written by a restaurant critic in the food magazine Bon Appetit is not.
Each type of content is valuable. In today’s world, let the user decide. Some may prefer a hand crafted picture frame made by someone in their home and sold on Etsy, others will head to buy a manufactured one from Crate and Barrel.
User-generated content is even part of mainstream journalism. Tweets, blogs, Facebook posts are all part of the mosaic that users utilize to publish and consume news. One of the great ways to watch a live sports event is to listen to the announcers (i.e. professionals) and follow along on Twitter, where the real fans bare their souls when a call goes against them. (UGC) (If you haven’t done this, I highly recommend it — especially during the NHL playoffs.) Leaving aside the real problem of truth in reporting, which is a story for another day, suffice to say, users have multiple choices to get their news and are not limited to a single newspaper or evening news broadcast.
The same, however, cannot be said for the most widely used feature on the internet: search. In this area, there is a single source for information: the Google algorithm. One can even venture to say that the algorithm in search is the equivalent of a “professional.” And, millions if not billions of dollars are poured into SEO, SEM, and other marketing ventures, all in an effort to get a website boosted in the Google result set for particular queries. For good reason. Presence on the first page of results will drive many more eyeballs to a site.
The reason so many people use Google is that for the most part, Google works. It gives you a relevant result to your query. But it doesn’t give you choice. To take an extreme example, in last year’s election, Google was accused of offering only one perspective on Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The accusation was accurate: They were offering the perspective of their algorithm.
Many years ago, there were attempts to insert a human voice into the world of search. But, new search engines with user-generated results have not only not penetrated the mainstream, they have had challenges even getting off the ground. Even Jimmy Wales who started Wikipedia, and wanted to enable user participation in search did not succeed.
Early reviews of Wikia were not kind. Maybe some of that was due to the high expectations (How often is it that much of our opinions are formed based on what our expectations are going in?) but the mere threat of the project was significant enough that Google launched capabilities within Google Search that would let humans influence results. Called SearchWiki, it let you rank your result sets and even comment.
Wikia Search had a short shelf life and was shut down in 2009. SearchWiki was shut down shortly thereafter in early 2010. The reason for Wikia Search’s inability to penetrate the search market are plenty but like many ideas, it may be one of timing. The world in 2009 was vastly different than it is today. The world economy was teetering on the brink of disaster, funding of new entities was challenging, and companies needed to focus on profitability, not growth at all costs. Jimmy Wales acknowledged as much. In the world of social, tweets were not as prevalent, Facebook was still private and Snapchat didn’t even exist.
Mahalo was another company that tried human generated answers to search queries. It launched in 2007. Mahalo offered human created result sets to search queries, built by editors it contracted with who created those result sets. It relied on Google for much of its traffic and when Google made changes to its search algorithm, Mahalo’s traffic declined and it eventually shut down. One can think of Quora as a next generation Mahalo for questions and answers but there is no traditional UGC search engine that exists in today’s market.
A lot has changed since these last attempts at user-generated search results. Social has become much more prominent in everyday life. That has empowered and enabled users to publish and disseminate content and to share their voice within their circle of friends, or more broadly to a larger community if a post, image, video goes viral. Videos and images are now a part of how we communicate; Instagram is a perfect example of users communicating primarily by sharing pictures.
Our thinking behind launching GoTo.com was to let users utilize all the different types of media at their disposal and curate their perspective on subjects that they are passionate about and to display that perspective in search results, above the algorithmic stack of results. In essence, we want to do for users what the initial GoTo.com did for advertisers years ago when it leveled the playing field for all advertisers. Before the original GoTo, the only online advertising option available to advertisers were large ad buys on a CPM basis. By introducing a platform that enabled any advertiser, of any size, with any budget, to create a search listing as an ad unit, and be charged for that ad unit on a CPC basis, the original GoTo.com (We can call that GoTo I) democratized search for advertisers.
Today, several former GoTo I employees seek to democratize search for users. We don’t see ourselves replacing Google for factual based search queries. There is one answer for the years John Adams was President or the height of the Eiffel Tower. However, for most other queries, there are multiple perspectives. “55 inch HDTVs”, “How to play Old Man by Neil Young on guitar”, “Training for an Ultramarathon”, are each queries for which there is no single right answer. There is no first page of results that suits everyone, which is largely what Google offers (other than taking geo into account). For example, some of us on our team like to sail; others do not. Yet we all get the same set of search results when we search “sailing” on Google. That does not make any sense.
What if, we asked, when building the new GoTo, there was a platform that enabled user-generated results (what we call Collections) from curators with multiple perspectives on a search query? What if, those perspectives could be ranked based not just on the quality of the Collection, but on the searcher as well. What if, the curator and the searcher had a history on GoTo such that it helps us value the merits of the Collection for that searcher and rank it accordingly and that the sets of results for searchers would not be uniform cross the board?
These are all questions we hope to answer. The good news is we are off to a good start. Search volume is growing. Collections are being made. An early example of what we are trying to achieve can be seen by searching for“yoga for beginners.” There are already multiple Collections on this topic. Each one is created by a user with a different profile. One is a Health Nut, another is a Fitness Freak. There are others. These profiles, which we call a GoTo Hat, represent the curator’s personality as it relates to that specific Collection. Think about it. We all wear different hats during the day. Student, Red Sox fan, Democrat, Lover of Poetry, Piano Player. And we can define that more narrowly — College Senior, Fanatical Red Sox Fan, Reformed Democrat, Classical Pianist, etc. The more we define ourselves the better search experience is created for searchers.
So back to “yoga for beginners.” When a user searches on that term, if they are a health nut, they might gravitate more towards the Collection created by a fellow health nut. And even though another Collection is ranked higher, because the curator has identified as a health nut, the searcher who is also a health nut may be more inclined to click on, and identify with, the Collection created by a fellow health nut.
Of course, the searcher may find they have nothing in common with the health nut who created that Collection. They might have different philosophies about health, yoga, fitness even though they share a common characteristic. Our platform does not presuppose any relationship between searcher and curator. Because that is the exact concept of a robust UGC search engine. There is no one size fits all. And, what a user may value today they may not value tomorrow. Today, I may search “Paris” to learn about places to stay and things to do and tomorrow, I may search “Paris” to learn about the city’s history. I may want to access different Collections each time and no search engine, no, not even Google, can know my intent with certainty.
Another great example of what we are building is the search term “kidney donation”. There currently is one Collection for that term but that Collection fits the bill of the power of UGC search. It is built by a user who donated a kidney, publishing and sharing his experiences in a Collection so that other users who may want to donate a kidney will be able to benefit from his Collection in a personal way that a link to a website from Google cannot do.
We are not naive. We know this is a tremendous hill to climb. We strongly believe that there is a place in internet search for a human voice. We know others have tried before. We hear the skepticism as well that internet search works just fine. But, as Steve Jobs once said, “a lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” And just like before there was Facebook, there was Friendster and MySpace, we hope that one day, UGC Search can be a component of users’ internet interactions on GoTo.com.
Check our site and see for yourself. Create a Collection. Become a part of UGC search. And, together, we can make a difference.
