What about the Information Age?

The World Wide Web ushered in an age of unprecedented publication of information. Ultimately this meant lots more transparency all across the information spectrum and transparency is arguably the biggest contribution of the “Information Age” to the digital society – from technology to politics, from health to music, we are now able to inform ourselves about almost everything.

The information age however brought a major problem with it – too much information. Search tools like Google and Yahoo helped to find information by searching the web. Current search engine technology works well for keyword based searches and really enabled information age as we know it today.

Search is still a hotly researched topic because finding answers even to relatively simple questions like “a list of hotels in Italy that have special programs for kids”, does not provide very usable results. At the Red Herring Venture Market Europe 2007 conference in Cannes, France for European entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, this theme was discussed under the heading Search 3.0. While there were new ideas (Polar Rose, Q-Go), most participants weren’t very inclined to take on the giant of the search industry, Google.

The evolution of the information age offers some interesting business possibilities. More and more information is transmitted and stored as audio and video, but difficult to find after that. The evolution of web search technology is advancing on the technical front. The information age seems to be evolving towards the age of social information, where information is reviewed and ranked by society. This mechanism could offer a substitute or at least supplement the way information is searched and found in the digital society.