Keen On… Brad Noble: Why Google’s “Search Plus Your World” Is Creepy (TCTV)

Google’s “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW) continues to jeopardize the company’s world. It’s a moral minus, Alexia says. Others have gone further – saying that SPYW fundamentally compromises Google as an objective search engine and raises many anti-trust issues. So what, exactly, will be the impact of SPYW on Google’s artificial algorithm and how central will social search become in our Web 3.0 age?

To talk more substantively about SPYW, I invited Brad Noble, the founder of the promising Twitter search engine PostPost, into our New York City studio to explain to me why Google’s new product creeps him out. The problem, he explained to me, is that, with SPYW, Google is undermining itself as the most trusted source of all the world’s information. The artificial algorithm was objective, he explained, but SPYW is not only self-serving but will inevitably serve up biased results. So with SPYW, he suggests, Google goes from being the core of the Web 2.0 economy to just another social play in today’s Web 3.0 world of ubiquitous personal data.

So is Noble right – does SPYW creep you out?