Techrigy is a social media search and discovery company. Our SM2 service allows brand marketers and PR pros to track conversations and sentiment across blogs, wikis, online video, microblogs like Twitter and other social media in real time. As a domain owner, entering this vast universe of user-generated content (UGC), brings up something very interesting. This social media eco-system has millions of participants, members and users and very little of it rests on unique domains. In fact it is an entirely different iteration of the web. Nothing is static, communities form and dissolve constantly, opinions and ideas spread way too fast for conventional search to index and track, and these trends and memes can make or break a candidate, a product or a reputation overnight.

Unlike sites on domains, social media resides in a sphere of reputation that is fickle at best. Concepts like the social graph which (as I interpret it) attempt to map where you and your ideas reside in a three axis grid, are not fixed- they change as relationships change. Other concepts like semantic search attempt to understand the context of a query so they can improve the relevancy of results, the never-ending Holy Grail of search.

As you might understand the challenge of marketing this new universe of ideas is both irresistible and daunting. It took me months to be able to write the sentences above and feel that they made sense to me. Now I have to explain them to others and help them see why they should care about what people are doing and saying in that universe. Pretty cool or should I say Dyson?

One of the big trends in search is the use of actual humans to parse results for accuracy, a la Mahalo. The problem is that this cannot scale  the level required for a universal search engine like the Goog. There are simply not enough people to do it and it’s not fast enough. However there is a way to do human-monitored search and I think Google knows what it is.

First I’m going to back up a bit. There is a Captcha system out there that takes advantage of all these humans typing in text they see as an image that goes beyond a security measure. As they type they are verifying words that have been captured by scanning systems used to scan books. This serves as a human editing system for an automated process. Quite clever really, as it does not require paid employees nor does it add to anyone’s workload- they’re going to type these words anyway.

Fast forward to the social network concept. LinkedIn was built by people entering their own information and updating it, making connections with people they know, forming groups, etc. It has a Q&A function where users can ask questions and get answers from other users who are, ostensibly, experts. It also has a job posting system tied in with a recommendation system. All of these elements together add up to a database of detailed information on people created and maintained by people (millions of people) who are unpaid. They’ve created a human-powered search engine that can and does scale. FaceBook, MySpace, Orkut, Hi5- they are all search engines with the dataset kept up by users.

With Google getting into this space more universally (they were already there with Orkut, which they acquired a few years ago, but is principally popular in South America) they are adding a human screening capability to their data on humans. With iGoogle they have my daily habits at their fingertips. Adding in a social network or two means they’ll also have that data in a social context- who I’m connected to and how. With a few more acquisitions like Tripit, which helps users track their travel itineraries (very cool, BTW), they could also track where I’m traveling, etc., etc.

I suspect there will be businesses that specialize in configuring Google assets to create specialized datastreams and searches. I’d thought of doing one that simply configured Google’s Apps for business use, something like the way RedHat works with Linux- Find out what the business needs, configure browser and application preferences, logins, etc., and distribute those preferences to employees with set-up instructions. I’m not doing it but it will happen.

Google is staying on strategy: to organize the world’s information. Instead of bemoaning their ubiquity, try looking for opportunities in their eco-system. They’re all over the place.

I think I respectfully disagree with Hawking about whether these ‘lifeforms’ are all malevolent. You could certainly argue that the algorithms and search index bots created by the Googles of the world are in fact very similar to viruses: They travel the web from link to link gathering as much information as possible and transmit that information back to a private company that profits from it. Is this technically different from a virus that travels to your hard drive and transmits your personal information back to someone whose intent is to profit from it? The intent is the same but the word ‘personal’ is where the difference lies. When you get personal you break the law.

There is a lot of debate among online marketers about the tracking of individual behavior on the web. Behavioral targeting and retargeting use your surfing history to assemble a profile of what you’re interested in and then use that profile to serve up ads that they think you will be interested in. These ads appear in sites you are expected to surf to. For advertisers these ‘targeted by intent and relevance’ ads are far more valuable than taking a shotgun approach to a campaign. So is your privacy being invaded? Are they related to malicious viruses? Again, no, because they only know your IP address, not your identity.

This is where the line is drawn in the sand in online marketing. As long as they can’t identify us personally these techniques should be legal. To use personal information we must have opted-in or given permission for that use. As regulators look at the world of personalized marketing online this should be the standard benchmark for defining the difference between legitimate targeted marketing tactics and spammy illegal attempts to acquire personal information without permission.

If you place a form on your web site Google can now enter any possible combination of information, radio button choices, checkboxes, etc., and index the results that come back for the form. They call this accessing the ‘Deep Web’, that part of the web that, until now, could only be accessed by a human entering information. It is deep in the sense that they now index all the possible underlying data in an online database that is not protected by a security layer (at least that’s how I read it).

Implications? Optimize those forms and your results pages and make sure they return relevant results or you might get purged.

And, BTW, dump your Microsoft and Yahoo stock- they are not even on the same planet with these guys.