Will cooperation between search engines and social media be the future direction?
More and more young people are using social media as their search engine, posing a threat to traditional search engines. As a traditional search engine, Google chooses to collaborate with social media to gain more consumer insights and enhance its search business. Sociable: Reddit partners with Google on a data-sharing deal for search discusses a new agreement between Google and Reddit. Under this agreement, Google will have exclusive access to Reddit data for its search business and generative artificial intelligence projects. This agreement is one of Google’s strategic moves to strengthen its search business. Specifically, Google will leverage Reddit data to optimize its search functionality and integrate it into its evolving Gemini model. I believe this is not the future direction, especially for larger social media platforms.
The search business of social media competes with traditional search engines.
In my previous post Gen Z’s Google: Social Media — — How can brands play the game?, I mentioned that traditional search engines and social media’s search business are in competition. More and more young people are choosing to use social media as their search engine because it offers an irreplaceable interactive experience. For larger social media platforms like TikTok, have their own user data and can customize content recommendations based on individual preferences, providing a better-personalized service experience. If they choose to collaborate with Google, they may lose the uniqueness of personalized service customization. In contrast, I believe Reddit’s collaboration with Google is largely due to Reddit’s relatively lower traffic and fewer active users compared to TikTok. Reddit hopes that by partnering with a large platform like Google, it can increase its visibility by having its posts referenced in search results. I think for some mature social media platforms, they don’t need the benefits that Google could bring.
Traditional search engines can leverage their AI capabilities to obtain data and enhance personalized search services.
Essentially, most major traditional search engine companies have their own AI businesses, and people are increasingly turning to AI for inquiries. I believe traditional search engine companies can create profiles for customers and use their inquiries to AI to explore their areas of interest. Different individuals ask AI different questions. The article The Top 10 Most Popular Prompts to Ask ChatGPT: shows that most questions asked to AI are deeper and more complex as if exploring the mysteries of life. So, I think if traditional search engine companies can use this data effectively, it can actually strike a chord more directly than the data presented by social media users, which often reflects surface-level interests.
