Searching in other places

A long and very interesting interview in The Atlantic with Evan Sharp, one of the cofounders of Pinterest, got me thinking about how we search beyond search engines, about tools that have become essential for many tasks that we carry out over the course of a day online.

As regards Pinterest, searching has become one of the main reasons I use it. I have stored a huge amount of reading material on it: every day after choosing what I am going to write about on this blog, I immerse myself in Pinterest in search of related news items that I have stored there recently. Searching for the name of a person or a computer brings up the title on the screen, and seeing a reminder of the articles that I have stored allows me to find links and references that support or enrich my analysis. The possibility of restricting my search to my pins or to those of other users adds the possibility of finding things that I might have overlooked, and makes it easier to search for my own material.

In reality, Pinterest’s search potential is the pretty much the same as any other platform where the users store and select information. Before Pinterest came along, I used Delicious, which many people used for storing references they found online using folders on a multiplatform basis, and that meant that searching there only produced results that you had considered sufficiently useful or relevant to bother collating there. In practice, searching was like a refined version of the web, filtered many times over by hundreds of users, and that could lead to the discovery of additional material. In many cases, for documenting articles, Delicious has been of great use to me.

The idea of value coming from search functions has been clear in some cases: when Twitter started out, among its first acquisitions was Summize, a company specializing in searches that played a big role in the company’s development (for some time, the bulk of the company’s earnings came from the results the company provided to Bing and Google as part of what has become known as real-time search).

How many sites whose main function is not searching have since turned into places where we search for material? Aside from Pinterest or Delicious, I would highlight Twitter, which is increasingly becoming an identity manager: if the information I need about somebody isn’t on Wikipedia, which is still the first place I look, then I tend to use Twitter. This is also something that About.me can help with; it’s a kind of inventory of resources about a somebody put together by them.

But these kinds of atypical searches are on the increase, and certainly not limited to users like me. YouTube may not really be the second-largest search engine, although it receives some three billion search requests a month, but it would also be stupid to deny its importance when it comes to providing information in audio or video format.

Facebook is a similar case: the social network has shifted from being a page where people looked for information about other people to one where growing numbers of people go to look for information about brands and products, hoping not so much to find out what they might have to say about themselves, but what other people have to say about those brands and products, such as how well the brand interacts with customers, or any doubts or questions related to its acquisition.

The consequences of this shift are potentially enormous: moving from users who were once only interested in finding other people to searching for businesses, and thus open to advertising or purchase proposals could be one of the ways that the social networks make money in the future.

In an environment characterized by a hyper-abundance of information, it seems logical that searching will become increasingly important, which is pretty much borne out by Google’s ubiquitous presence, and its net worth. But when it comes to thinking about searching, we need to go beyond the idea of the search engine, and place it in the context of the services we use as well.

And you? Do you search in places that provide value and that you’d like to share?

(En español, aquí)