Discovery: The next big thing

Ten years ago few would have predicted the 800 pound gorilla that search has become. Back then, we had Hotbot and Lycos, Webcrawler and Infoseek, Yahoo and Google. None with a clear idea of how to make any money. And most websites back then didn't have (or need) a robust site-search solution. We "surfed" the Web, skimming along the surface. And we were happy.

But much has changed in ten years. Today, Google makes billions serving up ads based on search keywords. Yahoo claims to be "the world's most visited homepage." And enterprise search is now a huge trend as large organizations struggle to organize and access their vast collections of digital information.

Search is and will continue to be very important. But a new trend is also emerging: Discovery.

I think of it this way:

• Search helps you find things you are looking for
• Discovery helps you find things you are interested in, but that you didn't even know existed
  

The leader in this area is a site called StumbleUpon. It's basically an application that recommends interesting sites for you based on your interests and the votes of other, similar StumbleUpon users. Today StumbleUpon released StumbleThru, which will surface the best content on popular Websites - "the best music artists on MySpace, the best photos on Flickr, the most relevant articles on Wikipedia. It's kind of a way to discover interesting information without actually having to search for it."

Google likes this idea so much they have created a similar "recommendation engine" called Google Dice.

Sites like Digg and Reddit offer discovery through their communities. They "crowdsource" the discovery of what's new and interesting. Newsvine and NowPublic do the same for news.

As the Internet continues to grow in size, complexity and importance, the act of discovery will likely play an integral role in how we make sense of it all.