Not surprisingly, it involves a much greater amount of personalization.
The basic idea is, you leave enough information - footprints over the web - for Google to figure out what you like to read about, what you are interested in, and the search results you get should reflect that. You should end up seeing information that's relevant to you.
Bing already has a challenging vision in play. (Keep reading, this won't be about search engine wars - scout's honor.) Microsoft wants to create a decision engine, which is engineered to display hits that are the most relevant generally. Their basic idea is, there's too much information out there already, and 89% of the time, you can predict what 89% of the people are actually looking for. So why bother showing all the stuff, when all you really need is to find medication for that German dude who leaves your things in the fridge?
Which, again, makes sense. You believe in crowd sourcing and maths, you stick to Google. You believe in machine-aided editorial work, you switch to Bing.
Point is: assuming Microsoft in the next five years can get Bing set up the way they envision it today, and assuming Google will still be able to keep 180 days of browsing data and all the other bits of info you leave behind for them on various networks, you will have two distinct sources of information.
Both eliminating the thing that made the internet so wildly popular for the flavor of geeks I belong to - those clinically curious enough to actually enjoy discovering random information.
(Ever got lost for hours reading wikipedia articles? Keeps happening to me all the time.)
Which is a trap, really. You need outside influences, especially when it comes to information. And if search engines start deciding themselves about the information you should see...
...the chance of discovering something radically new, interesting, and outside your normal daily information net is reduced exponentially.
Try and recall the sheer range of topics visited (even if just on a surface level) during your university days. Those corridors and pubs and coffee houses hosted wild conversations between vastly different people all the time - keeping you exposed to interesting, random and new information on a daily basis. Then you joined the workforce, settled with a close bunch of friends, and suddenly all everyone seems to be able to talk about are either work related, or relationships, or hobbies.
The amount of unexpected information finding you was reduced, drastically, by you entering a certain lifestyle, and a certain network of connections.
And the same is about to happen with search results - as they get more personal (Google) or general (Bing), you will lose more and more of the random surprises.
Google Reader is a viable (though not all-round) solution to help fight that.
Its chief weapon is (surprise) the social aspect. It's not about being able to gather a bunch of feeds to a single site, where reading is a bit more convenient; it's about being able to share what's really interesting with the rest of your friends.
Tag and share articles of interest, and thus reintroduce the element of random discovery - for them. And through them - for you.
At worst, you'll end up reading something vaguely interesting. At best, you'll have things to discuss when you meet for beer the next time. But most importantly: your internet will not be about just you.
Give random information a chance. Share the interesting bits; readable content beats the crap out of a Facebook wall filled with meaningless quiz results any day.
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