Google versus human powered search engines (and Foxmarks)

Accessing your bookmarks from any computer was always a problem until the social bookmark sites such as De.licio.us and Digg.com came along. On these sites you simply create an account and save web pages to your account accessible from any website. But in practice you find that you end up saving lots and lots of web pages with no real rhyme or reason. Certainly not like the bookmarks in your browser, which are clearly labelled and highly organised into relevant categories.

I always thought the issue of bookmarks across multiple computers was a real problem, and although I have dumped lots of sites into Digg I hardly tag them with much thought. But, the other day I heard about Foxmarks via the Techcrunch blog. It seemed like the solution to all problems – a free plugin for Firefox that allowed you to synchronise your browser bookmarks across numerous computers. To make this product even more exciting Mitch Kapor (the guy who launched Lotus 123 in the 80’s) is heading it up and the stated plan is to use the intelligence of the collective masses bookmarks and ordering of these bookmarks by the user with some considered relevancy to create a human powered search engine. Perhaps this is the competitor to Google that everyone is waiting on with baited breath.

Recent interest in the launch of the Mahalo search engine, which is completely human powered, continues the debates over Google versus the rest of the world – which is ongoing and if Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) ever gets his human powered search engine off the ground it will only be even more heated. Those anti Google argue that the search results are not relevant enough to the search terms, that there are simply too many erroneous results and then there is the cheating of the results. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that purely human driven search engines can ever become a ‘real’ competitor to Google. There is a critical mass of results that need to be achieved before the search engine is usable and users very quickly lose interest in a search engine that does not have enough relevant results to provide them with what they are looking for – therefore, despite the numerous irrelevant results we are immediately drawn back to Google. I submitted Xebidy Strategic Design to Mahalo over 6 weeks ago and it still has not been catalogued – let alone many of the major serach terms that I deal with ever day in the travel industry.

To me Foxmarks provides the alternative. A human powered, automated search engine based on taxonomies created for your very own personal use and therefore with greater relevancy and consideration – unlike the folksonomies of the social bookmarking sites with are plagued with throw-away terms.

But is has been interesting watching the comments section on the Tech Crunch post as many people have bought up examples of other such products which have existed in the past or exist now. That is, cross computer bookmarks. The most obvious one is Google; first there is your personal page which allows you to create bookmarks neatly organised into categories, and then there is Google Browser Sync which is also a plugin for Firefox syncing bookmarks and even cookies if you want. Then there are a whole host of others such as Yoono, ULinkIt (which became Quiver), Smarky, and Hot Links - which dates back to 2000.

What is the difference? With the exception of Google there is a big difference. Firstly, being a plugin for Firefox Foxmarks will gain a much faster pickup than other similar offerings, and that pickup will only grow as the exponential growth of Firefox continues. Smarky is also a Firefox plugin, but in my opinion Foxmarks will outstrip it overnight because of the weight of the guys like Mitch Kapor and Todd Agulnick which will create the necessary marketing hype.

But is Foxmarks the angelic competitor to Google? No! Those that see the Google algorithm as purely a construct of Page Rank are missing a very important point. There are so many factors that go into this complicated algorithm, such as inward and outward links, traffic, onsite optimisation techniques such as keyword density, keyword positioning within paragraphs, image naming and so on and so on. If Google believes that Foxmarks creates a database of any relevance they will simply include some level of weighting for bookmarks in Browser Sync and Google personal pages – overcoming this critical mass is surely nigh impossible.