Chinwag Live: Search versus Recommendation a no-brainer debate

September 3rd, 2008 by Wendy McAuliffe

Last night’s Chinwag Live: Search v. Recommendation event was not the packed out, sweaty debacle that it usually is. My hunch is the motion of the debate was not as sexy as widgets or social media measurement, and was also pretty much a foregone conclusion. At the end of the day, there’s not much of a case that can be made to suggest recommendation/review sites will win out over super beast Google (the ‘search’ side of the argument quickly became a Google one - pointed out by a heckler who commented “let’s get off Google’s dick!”).

With that in mind, there was little debating going on, but some interesting points were made about recommendation sites from a B2C point of view - interestingly no one brought up the role they can play within a B2B audience. To summarise:

• Only a fraction of a percentage of internet users add ‘+review’ to their search phrase - something that I was very surprised about as I do it all the time! I’d be interested to see more detailed stats on how search linguistics change between searching for specific information, and searching for inspiration or trusted reviews.
• Recommendation sites know very little about their active reviewers at the moment, and it was agreed that this detail is currently difficult to obtain. Panelist Walid Al Saqqaf, co-founder & COO of TrustedPlaces admitted that only 17% of his registered users write reviews, while a “much smaller” percentage of unregistered users are active reviewers.
• YouTube is becoming a popular destination for searching for reviews, particularly for mobile phones and digital cameras, and has the potential to overtake written review sites in the future.
• Twitter is also increasingly being used for micro-reviews.
• It is currently very difficult to measure reviewer intent across recommendation sites, which is limiting their usefulness and relevancy. According to Chinwag panelist Lisa Ditlefsen, Head of Search at Base One, Microsoft is currently looking to limit the number of review sites that rank in natural search rankings.
• People are generally more happy to give out personal information about themselves on social networks such as Facebook and Bebo, than on review websites such as Tripadvisor. The networking opportunity, from a business or personal perspective, is a key aspect that review websites need to tap into.

A good review of the event is also available on The Crowdstorm blog.

                              

Tags: chinwag, google, review sites, search, twitter, youtube

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Blog, Content, Industry events, Social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.