Community and Trust : Search, Discovery, Q&A
This I've noticed on a few fora I'm on - once members develop a certain level of trust in the community, they start depending on it for more than its stated, major purpose. These are usually theme/domain specific communities. For instance, an automobile group has threads asking for help with vacation destinations, restaurant selections, camera choices, and even how much bribe to pay and how. The ubiquitous "OT" on such groups is a major source of interactions within the community. Indeed, on one such group, there was enough traffic to justify creation of a parallel, <group>-OT list itself!
Some groups do try to stay 'focused' but inevitably yield to gray areas which might qualify as "slightly OT".
What does this mean for search ? Facebook, Aardvark etc are already starting to alter behaviour a little bit - intentionally or otherwise - and google.com is not the default place to seek answers to your queries. A whole lot of answers are much better sourced from people you know, since
- The queries sometimes have subjective answers.
- The context of the asker is very very pertinent and the community may be better aware of it that a generic algorithm.
- Many answers need references. A paediatrician, or the right price of a used DSLR, or the right bike to pick to start cycling, are often decided upon based on what other folks you trust say.
Of course index based search is hardly going to disappear - the 'book of facts' approach has always existed and will continue to be a great source for a whole lot of stuff. It may, though, need to get refined for more clarity/clues about the validity, correctness of the data it matches (as opposed to "here's a web page with a decent pagerank that has the keywords").
Yet, more and more, a lot many kinds of queries will move to networks. Facebook may handle some, but I suspect as a whole its not clean enough and the trust levels aren't quite there for all kinds of queries. There *is* space for less open, sharper niche networks that also support partially anonymized queries - perhaps even from external sources.
