Ever since their inception, search engines have sought to deliver better and better results to their users. Just a few years ago, they started defining “better” as “more personalized.” With social sites gaining prominence, how long will it be before search engines incorporate your specific social profile into your search results?
To a very limited extent, it's already happening. But if former Bing product lead Mark Johnson is right, it's going to be a long time before we see much more progress in that area. “If every user that comes [to Bing or Google] is getting a personalized experience based on Facebook data, based on the web graph, based on the social graph – holy crap, that's a lot of processes to do,” Johnson notes. He's quoted by Austin Carr in an article for Fast Company.
To Johnson, it's a matter of economics. Interpreting all of those social signals would involve huge server costs. Neither Bing nor Google would be willing to pay those costs without seeing “significant increases in quality of search results,” according to Johnson. Server costs would probably need to drop pretty dramatically before the economics of adding social signals in a more personalized way to search started making sense.
Here's the problem: search engines typically try to precache queries. PC Mag defines precaching as downloading data ahead of time in anticipation of its use. “For example, when a Web page is retrieved, the pages that users typically jump to when they leave that page might be precached in anticipation,” PC Mag explains. When a user sends a query to a search engine that it has seen before, it retrieves at least some precached results, for the sake of speed and conservation of resources.
But imagine what would happen if search engines had to take both your personalized search profile and your social graph into consideration. Since many people post regularly to Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites, Bing and Google wouldn't be able to just retrieve the same results they've used before. To deliver the best results, they'd have to recalculate everything every time someone searched. As Johnson notes, “if you have to go to the server to calculate every single query, your front-end costs go up. If Bing or Google sees a query that it's never seen before, and had to actually calculate a result on the fly, we're talking about using time on hundreds of thousands of servers.”
While Google does see its fair share of queries it has never seen before, the percentage of new queries is not as high as you might think. According to Google's internal data “We've never seen 16% of the queries we see every day.” Because of the economics involved, it's fair to assume that Google uses precaching to put up results for the other 84 percent of the queries it receives, and it's likely Bing does the same thing.
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