I love Google, I love Digg. But what if they loved each other?
What if they snuck off to a Las Vegas marriage parlour. Booked the Elvis and tied the knot?
What would their offspring be like?
There are a number of ways this could go.
Google News and Google Reader are integrated into the Digg system allowing people to vote on their favourite stories without having to submit.
Google integrates a Digg system into its search results pages allowing people to vote on the results. Only pages that are freshly crawled get the vote option and it is only available for three days. The results are collated in a seperate system and have not effect on the current search engine pages.
Digg has a “freshly crawled” section where Google sends newly crawled pages to be voted on.
Google shuns Digg, gets divorced and starts it’s own social voting system using Google News and Google Reader as it’s foundation.
If the serps had a function where you could vote up or down, would that make search better. I’m talking something like Reddit, which has been notoriously hard to game.
Anyone remember Infoseek? A search engine which enabled clicks on results to effect the results. Unfortunately, (or fortunately) it was easy to game.
Questions my lateral thinking raises would be:
Should a highly Dugg url get a bump in the SERPS?
Can Digg be replicated across the social spectrum and not be centered on technologists?
Can Diggers build a better search engine than Google, simply by voting up or down the serps?
Google and Digg are basically the same thing. Information delivery systems. They serve up information to people who initiate queries. Taking the best bits from both systems and melding them together would create a third information delivery system which would be very interesting.
When will we read the headline, “Google buys Digg”?