Search and the Social Sciences

Just before the weekend ReadWriteWeb posted a great blog covering Joel Spolsky‘s talk at Google, Anthropology: The Art of Building a Successful Social Site. It really is a great read and it hits on two topics I am imensely fascinated with: Anthropology and Search.

My BA was in Communications but as I’ve said before the research methodology I used for my senior thesis was Phenomenology, which is a type of anthropological research. I won’t go into all the thoughts I have on this because I’ve written too many long posts already but the article exemplifies why I think anthropology and sociology are so important right now. (Seriously, if I were to go back and get another Masters or a PhD it would be in one of those two.)

The second point of the article, and the reason that Joel built Stack Overflow, is that search is broken. More importantly we have gotten a taste of what real time, peer influenced search can do for us and we want more. Much, much more. Facebook knows it and that’s why they are tripping over themselves to mimic Twitter and FriendFeed. I think Google knows it but they aren’t admitting it publicly.

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