Search and receptivity

A short one this morning from Practicalist (ever worth reading) asks, What comes after search? Heck it’s short enough to reproduce in full:

Reading about the epic battle against Google that Microsoft, TimeWarner, and Yahoo continue to lose, I have to wonder if it’s really such a world-beating thing to own search. Right now it is, since the search box is the interface to much of the Internet for people. But isn’t that a sad, pinched state of affairs? There’s a lot more valuable information in Twitter and Facebook than in Google. Won’t something that lets me tap into that be much more valuable, and soon?

My first reaction is: Yeah! My second is: Wait. Is there a lot more valuable information in Twitter and Facebook than in Google? What kind of information, and to whom?

• What kind of information? The real-time-now kind of information, largely (there’s more, but I won’t address that now). As this recent ReadWriteWeb post put it, “[Google] indexes the historical web, and it does it better and faster than anyone else. It finds me after-the-fact reporting on major stories from major media companies.
  But it misses the real-time story. And that matters today.” Authority vs. currency.

• To whom? I think to anybody who likes new stuff and being surprised or delighted or simply aware. Google helps you find things. Twitter and Facebook help things find you. Which relates in a way to Mike Arauz’s post from a month ago on why discovery is so much more valuable than interruption. But he didn’t quite address that (giant) middle zone, where you’ve neither discovered nor been interrupted - just kept an ear to the ground.

To the bigger question of what comes after search, I don’t know, but for the moment I imagine it’s something like receptivity (as distinct from reception).