Gaurav Gupta's Blog

Larry and Sergey seemed to have better ideas when it came to web-search, far ahead of what AltaVista and others made us all used to in the 90’s. Industry experts have started debating and worrying about a single company knowing so much about each of us. Google knows what you search (which some people believe, defines who you are), it knows who you e-mail (GMail), it knows who your friends are (Orkut), it knows which sites you visit (Google Toolbar), it knows your schedules (Google Calendar). A scary proposition, one might believe.

But interestingly, Google is not my search engine of choice (atleast 50% of the times). There seems to be a better alternative around. Some may disregard my claims as baseless and absurd, until of course, they try out what I claim.

Let’s start off with a simple comparison. Try searching Google for “MTV”. Observe the search results (atleast the top 10) carefully. Google does a pretty good job at searching MTV’s homepage. There is after all, only one MTV and it’s not too hard to locate, given the PageRank algorithm Google operates upon.

Now let’s try a generic query like “free ebooks”. Again, try observing (and possibly clicking) a few URL’s that come up in the top 10 search results.

Clearly, there is a striking difference in the quality of the results obtained in the above two cases. Now let’s try the new “search engine”, called del.icio.us

Social bookmarking, has been an outcome of what we now know as Web 2.0. Simply put, it’s about bookmarking interesting and useful websites you come across on the Internet, and then sharing your bookmarks with others. In general, a measure of how many times a particular web-page or website is bookmarked can give us an idea of how “popular” it is on the net. del.icio.us is one such social bookmarking website, which is by far the most popular website of it’s kind.

So, continuing with our comparison, sign up with del.icio.us and search for “free ebooks”. You can expect a whole bunch of quality results, which probably are much closer to the kind of results you would have expected from Google.

Many times we need to find out “What’s the best site in India to buy books online?”. Google can list for you thousands of sites which could help you with your online shopping, but which of them is the best, the most reliable and most often used by other people? Google is clueless.

This leaves us with an interesting question – does Google need to re-think their page ranking strategies to include a measure of popularity count? (Bookmarking is a possible metric to evaluate this, there could be many more). Certainly not a bad idea. What do you think? (I would love your feedback on this article.)