Discovery isn’t just about “more things like this,” and neither is StumbleUpon. Rather, I go to StumbleUpon with no agenda other than “I want to find something neat.” At least that’s why I use it when I do.

I don’t know what I want beforehand, though, because if I did I could just go to Google and find it. That’s why I call serendipity a “mechanic” of StumbleUpon.

What you’re arguing for is a refined type of discovery, not something that isn’t discovery. Just as search was improved from the directory-and-keyword-based search engines of yore (e.g., AltaVista), discovery will be improved from its current model.

NetFlix provides a good example of this kind of “improved discovery.” There are tons of movies I want to see, but I’m really bad at noting them. By the time they’re out on DVD I’ve often forgotten that I wanted to watch them in the first place. NetFlix knows my preferences well enough that it often recommends them to me. Serendipity!

It even recommends movies I never heard of but wound up really liking. Just the other day I watched If…., which I doubt I ever would have seen without discovering it through NetFlix. I certainly couldn’t have searched for it and found it.

This is like saying You like Mythbusters so you like all things on Discovery Channel. When in truth I like all things DIY Science.

I find new things often while looking for old things. Commercials durring my favorite shows often introduce me to new things I would like. Yes they only do so with about 20% accuracy but this is because I could like Mythbusters for a lot of different reasons. I could like all things with a Cute Red Head (Kari Byron), or I could like all things with modifying Junk Cars, or I could like all things related to urban mythology. each of these would create different cross discovery scenarios, and with only a single point of reference there would be no way to know which was the reason I liked the show.

If however I had a list of all the shows you liked and a list of all the reasons you could like shows I could create a web of why you might like shows and look for intersections.

If you like Sex and the City, Myth Busters, Blood Rayne, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I know who killed me the movie…. We can determine you have a thing for red heads.

If you like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Myth Busters, Junk Yard Wars, and Monster Garage we can tell you like modifying cars.

If you like New Yankee Workshop, Myth Busters, Tooltime, and This Old House, we can tell you like shows with power tools.

The problem with search is that we typically only have your current search, and we don’t index sites by all of the micro categories, that you would need to make intelligent decisions about the best site for a sliver of a category. Though that is what I’m building….

Hmm, interesting. Is it just the case that search and discovery are distinct now but will meld over time?

Keyword search is unnatural, IMO, but natural language search isn’t the solution.

I guess the root is “I want to find something.” You have varying ideas of what you want to find. The less you know the more likely discovery will proffer a solution, and the more you know the more likely search will.

As both technologies mature the transition between the two becomes less clear. Is that how it is going?

The prototypical examples of search and discovery are Google and StumbleUpon. Serendipity is part of discovery — learning about a new band for the first time, finding a movie I can watch ten times in a row, etc. It’s not party of search, where I know by-and-large what I want.

“Spivack wants to “do for data what the Web did for documents” and develop a standard, uniform system for semantic metadata. It’s the classic “dumb software, smart data” idea.”
We tried it before. They were called meta tags. A huge spam nightmare. External tagging (such as del.icio.us) is much more valuable if the size of the tagging community outweighs the spam.

“Furthermore, who uses the metadata on the site (besides, perhaps, related video) to find new content?” I search on YouTube a lot. I look for general categories of stuff (japanese tv show) as well as searching for an artist name to see if anything new comes up. I definitely click on the related links quite frequently. I love to click on things like Google Tech Talks and just browse through on the site. I find your argument strange, because I feel that I get more discovery out of YouTube than most other websites.

One interesting site you should look at is EveryZing. It indexes a lot of video and audio content by doing speech to text. The text is not good enough to read on it’s own, but it’s good enough to search.

Maybe I am weird though, because I never channel surf. I Tivo and use search- albeit, not keyword search, but browsing by category. Guided navigation…that’s what’s next (it’s actually mostly already here). http://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/collections/72157603789246885/