Facebook: the New and Improved AOL?

When you think about Google, Bing, and the future of search, you have to wonder if the mechanism can really survive much longer. Search is ridiculous.

A search system like Google essentially caches the entire Internet, every Web page and sub-page, into massive server farms around the world where they are indexed and used as targets for finding specific information. While this seemed like a good idea a decade ago, the enormity of the stored data now strains entire power grids. Server farms are ideally built next to massive hydro-electric plants just to operate.

All this so I can find a needle in a haystack reference.

Data Retention Dilemma
The amount of data on the net tends to languish forever on active servers that cannot afford the time to find and delete old garbage. Search engine providers instead buy more storage and leave everything active. This is what they mean when they say "once it is one the Internet it is on forever."

Every so often a large "site of sites," such as Geocities, shutters and removes scads of marginal little sites. But even that content is stored someplace to be passed around at a later date. The entire Geocities archive was released to the public as a 652GB file to be found on some Bitorrent indexes. Although not technically on the Internet, it's still out there.

The point is, Google and Bing and anyone else who wants to play this game have to cache a lot of data. But why should Google AND Bing and others have to duplicate the Internet over and over? A joint venture would be the way go and then run your own search algorithms on the data pile.

That would probably be illegal for competitive reasons, leaving the current mess intact.

There is no reasonable solution to the modern and developing Tower of Babel unless everything changes regarding how things are posted on the Internet itself.

Downhill Battle
Unless protocols are developed that force every page on the net to be self-indexing, self-categorizing, and self-sorting, this chaos will remain. Search results will deteriorate. I already go to regional Google centers such as Google.fr in France to get proper results for certain searches that never come up with regular searches using Google.com.

One development that was a huge disappointment was the constant emergence and disappearance of new search technologies eventually bought out by either Yahoo or Google. Yahoo bought a slew of them and did nothing with them. Others, like FAST from Scandinavia, showed a lot of promise as the engineers toyed with new ways of looking at data stores.

No Real Competition
Eventually, with new ideas squashed by mergers and acquisitions, the Google brute force approach prevailed. But the model is old and tired and barely works.

Facebook was supposed to develop a Google killer with a so-called social search that would find desired pages through some sort of social networking scheme. The idea scared Google into creating Google+, but nothing major has happened except an apparent downturn in search activity overall. As reported in Quartz and elsewhere, search queries have actually peaked and may be on the decline.

This may have more to do with the nature of modern computer users. They gravitate towards a closed proprietary system (Facebook) where there is structure. While there is structure, there is also a stream of neverending albeit controlled information and entertainment. This has a dulling effect on the individual in much the same way the original AOL (with its keyword meme) used to have.

Facebook Changes Everything
I've always said that Facebook is the new and improved AOL. It's for people who do not want to get all confused by the crazy Internet. It is Internet enough for them.

If you survey many Facebook users, you'll find a majority of them cannot, in fact, do any sort of complex Google search. While Google is not about to go out of business any time soon, the company is aware of what looks to me like a sea change.

With a now mildly dwindling user base that could easily become a massively dwindling user base, how can Google rationalize building out more and more massive data centers to account for the still growing net?

If these trends are real, the answer is, that they cannot keep doing this.

Then what happens? Massive search deterioration that's what.

Once you can't find anything at all on the net maybe then the entire structure will be forced to change. It can't happen soon enough.