It seems that search engines are an immutable fact of early-twenty-first cen­tury exis­tence. We can’t escape them in any imme­di­ate sense, and can­not believe they could ever dis­ap­pear (I recall one instance on Whirlpool forums where a user thought his/her ISP’s inter­a­tional link must be down because he couldn’t access Google. This was one of the very few times Google had actu­ally dropped off the face of the planet for about twenty min­utes. It was sim­ply out­side the realm of possibility.)

Yet, increas­ingly, our surf­ing habits are defined by this bizarre social con­cept that seems to be shap­ing cer­tainly acqui­si­tions and web-two-point-oh-bubblism, wherein web­sites serve users by con­nect­ing them with one another, not on the basis of them know­ing what they wanted, but rather in a bizarre a pri­ori man­ner whereby degrees-of-separation (MySpace) or user-supplied-already-knowns (Live­Jour­nal, Xanga, etc.) define con­nect­ed­ness and dis­played content.

Search is no longer the macro-inter killer app, but an intra-site facil­ity applied to micro­cosm — often based on “trans­par­ent” tech­nol­ogy that has, on the basis of known knowns (in the words of a cer­tain Rums­feld), already done some of the hard work for users (I should say peo­ple, but don’t out of habit: it is an indus­try haz­ard) with­out actu­ally ask­ing them any­thing. This is where loca­tion– and organisation-based match­ing (cf. MySpace, Face­book, etc.) come in.

But none of this data is intel­li­gently search­able by generic engines.

None of this data (in the case of Myspace espe­cially, hor­ri­bly marked-up doing-everything-wrong-with-the-web tech­ni­cally entity that it is) is avail­able for index­ing by search engines because it’s not abid­ing by any defined seman­tics. There is not, for exam­ple, any over­whelm­ing use of micro­for­mats — hCard, etc. — for defin­ing con­tact details in any com­mon sense. Yet these things are search­able within a given website.

And, what’s more, these things are search­able with great pre­ci­sion within (social net­work­ing) sites. This is because of a very well defined inter­nal seman­tic (not the “seman­tic web”, but inter­nal data struc­tures) and an enforced obe­di­ence to these struc­tures that was never a part of pre-SocNet sites.

Soc­Net plat­forms are rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from web 1.0 sys­tems in that they are (iron­i­cally) vastly more con­strict­ing. As “web 1.0″ I would cite Geoc­i­ties and free web host­ing ser­vices, por­tals, and all-things-to-all-people con­tent net­works. Now, we’ve got blogs (pre­cisely defined web­sites), MySpace (chiefly Soc­Net pro­files with bits on the fringes com­mon to the users, and now with enough impe­tus to appear unstop­pable), Flickr (free — and fee-for-service that peo­ple actu­ally pay for — web host­ing, pre­cisely defined as photo host­ing), and, strangely, a por­tal (Yahoo!) still on top of Alexa 500 rank­ings. A por­tal that owns both Flickr and Geoc­i­ties, but has changed the model of the lat­ter to place greater empha­sis on fee-for-service host­ing. But I digress into strat­egy — the point is not that, but rather in the way social data is stored.

Flickr is meta-data rich. It uses a well defined sys­tem based on EXIF, intrin­sic seman­tics (title, descrip­tion, tags — tags that get used prop­erly, unlike Face­book which doesn’t bother to make such things clear — I want Face­book to flop, by the way, because it annoys me, so don’t expect nice things to be said about it. It’s a poor closed-system imi­ta­tor, albeit with a stu­pidly effec­tive adver­tis­ing model every­one else should be wish­ing they came up with first but haven’t seen in order to copy… because it’s a closed sys­tem (or used to be) exclu­sive in scope. Which makes it very effec­tive SocNet/Web 2.0, by my own def­i­n­i­tion, so I don’t really have a basis for com­plaint.) and extrin­sic seman­tics (groups, pools, etc.).

Pro­files, unlike ‘pure’ Soc­Net (Myspace, Face­book), per­mit anonymity, but allow dis­clo­sure of as much as is desired: at any rate, that is not the pur­pose of the site. Myspace/Facebook’s rai­son d’etre is pro­files. (Well, and that and cash-cow-marketing-tool of the *R**IA’s of the world) Accord­ingly, its pro­files have very def­i­nite seman­tics even whilst the rest of the site may not (I speak of Myspace more, here). Myspace gives core “Details” pro­file info indi­vid­ual fields, whilst allow­ing a diverse “Inter­ests & Per­son­al­ity” infor­ma­tion in freeform textar­eas that are designed to entice users into par­tic­i­pa­tion (and, pos­si­bly, aid­ing more fuzzy searches — but mostly I think it’s just com­pelling con­tent, as there is no imme­di­ately obvi­ous way to search that data).

“Inter­ests & Per­son­al­ity”, along with blog con­tent, seems to be the only freeform con­tributed mate­r­ial avail­able on the site. Want music or a video with your pro­file? You’ve got to browse to the band’s site, load the player (no go in Opera with Flash at the minute, it seems), and then select “Add” on the track. They (yeah, it’s kinda big-brotherish) know exactly what song you chose, what band it’s from, what genre, etc. — that is to say, unam­bigu­ously and cer­tainly beyond a probably-common song title. This isn’t an upload-yourself-and-we’ll-manage-rights kind of thing. The offi­cial­ity gives that inter­nal data struc­ture that much more depth: but, again, the point is that the data is inter­nal and not open.

This, it seems, is the defin­ing qual­ity of Soc­Net. That’s what makes the ideas of open fed­er­a­tion advo­cated by Google Talk ear­lier this year so bizarre for the rest of us. We don’t par­tic­u­larly care, because closed sys­tems mean inno­va­tion (because we can define new data for our­selves to work with) and/or exten­si­bil­ity that isn’t pos­si­ble in an open plat­form (if, for exam­ple, not all fed­er­ated part­ners agree to a spec exten­sion — take, for exam­ple, Google Talk’s own Jab­ber base and pro­pri­etary VoIP on top of that). Open­ness is in Google’s inter­ests, because it’s so depen­dent on things being open for its core busi­ness (search). But real peo­ple want ser­vices that work, not ser­vices that push them to another site. I’ve never trusted sites that bounce me off to Google for their site’s search, even if it’s one of those crappy co-branded things. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you make some­one inspect your web­site from an infe­rior per­spec­tive when all the infor­ma­tion is stored in a data­base, with the pos­si­bil­ity of more seman­ti­cally mean­ing­ful search open inter­nally only?

Google won’t deal with your inter­nal search needs. It’s not designed to. It does a great job of deal­ing with pub­licly indexed mate­ri­als com­pletely aside from Soc­Net ser­vices. Soc­Net sites thrive on and are empow­ered by strong intrin­sic seman­tics that make clever profile-based (or UGC–based) search pos­si­ble, which builds loy­alty etcetera in a way for­eign to infor­ma­tional web­sites. Soc­Net is expe­ri­en­tial and (sur­prise sur­prise) social — it doesn’t have to be about anything.

Con­tent was deposed as king some­time in the mid­dle of the first decade of the twenty first cen­tury, and with that regime change his deputy, Search, was also shuf­fled to a some­what less promi­nent posi­tion. Some­where out of sight, Search’s iden­ti­cal twin, Query, is the real power behind the throne: it uses unin­dexed data and makes clever links to bring peo­ple closer together in a way that tra­di­tional search engines had never even envisaged.