I’m onsite this week at ad tech (the well-known technology meets interatcive marketing conference). Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners moderated a panel here entitled “Internet Economy: Start-ups, Bubbles and Buyouts.” Roger is known as one of the most versatile technology investors around and that made him a really good choice to manage this discussion.

The very last question from audience related to possible alternatives to Google. Roger provided some of his own take on the matter. He appeared very resolute that better techniques for organizing web content will surface to challenge Google. They way he looked at it, Google falls short when it comes to handling any type of user needs that don’t involve keywords (to paraphrase, “Google doesn’t work well when you give it a few words or a sentence”). His takeaway — editorial is a really important layer which explains the value of Wikipedia and other forms of aggregation that will emerge based on wiki and collaboration tools.Roger facetiously mentioned the use of internal staff as an interface to Google (to paraphrase, “I need something between me and Google”). That makes alot of sense given Roger’s profession — he’s a big time private equity guy who has the resources to delegate — as well as his needs (alot of intelligent sifting is required to structure information for purposes of due diligence and formulating a point of view on an investment). That said, I think Roger is spot-on with his comments in a general web-scale context.So how do we allow every user to harness the web the same way Roger does? Applications like Bazooked are trying to accomplish exactly that. Adding editorial layers between Google and users to make interaction with web content more efficient and streamlined is the answer. Where I depart from Roger is his categorization of Google’s approach as algorithmic in contrast to alternatives which he refers to as editorial based. The categorization is correct but the contrast is not. There are certainly editorial approaches which can be algorithmically driven. In fact, the types of user experiences that Roger correctly envisions may come as result of a good merger of the two.

Filed under: Events, Google, People

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