Google‘s rise came because the internet exploded. The number of websites got so large that it was impossible to find anything by simply using human built online directories (like the old Yahoo).

But has the internet gotten too large for any single search engine? Microsoft doesnt think so, they just launched Bing. Google has moved into other areas of content creation (email, mobile, documents, etc.).

There are new search engines launching almost daily. Real time search engines. Social search engines. Semantic search engines.

Each tries to to the same thing. Take a keyword query and return what their technology determines is the single best answer.

At the same time of the internet’s explosion, blogs have also exploded. Every day tens of thousands of blogs are started. Every day thousands of pages of content is created.

Throw on top of all that the explosion of social media. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and others are platforms where content is created almost minute by minute.

The speed of the expansion of the internet and the content created has accelerated to the point where no search engine can provide the one right answer to a single keyword query. The ability to find relevant content has become almost a losing battle.

Whats the answer? Its influence.

I have spoken on influence in the past (most recently at WordCamp Chicago):

Here is the basic concept: influence is on a one-to-one basis. Thats it. You can influence one person about one thing. Thats it.

So how does that matter in terms of search?

Imagine starting with an influencer. Think about a subject that matters to you. Who do you consider the expert on that topic. Then search through a corpus of content that person creates and curates. Your results will always be the most useful and relevant. They cant be any other way.

Marketers, Brand Managers and Advertisers believe the same thing. Walmart has put a ton of effort into finding online influencers and associating themselves with them. Same with many major brands.

Brands are learning that keyword search marketing is not as effective as it once was. Its too general, people are using more and more keywords in their queries to drive relevance. It has become all about the influencers.

IZEA knew that when they pioneered Pay-Per-Post. Regardless of your feelings around its morality, the practice has been booming, and while IZEA first iteration wasnt the best, they seem to have really figured something out, having attracted many top bloggers, and now provide a score and pricing based on the what the inherent influence of the blogger appears to be (I think they lay on traffic a bit more than true influence, but I really dont know).

The addition of influence into search is our model at Lijit. With a distributed model of search, we have to rely on the blogger to provide clue’s as to what the results should be. Add that the searcher trusts the expertise of the blogger, and you end up with a much better answer for the query. In essence, the influence of the blogger is added to the search to return the best results for the searcher, not a single answer for all searchers, but the right answer for that searcher from that blogger.

In the past, Google relied on the fact that people trusted their results as being better than all others (not being the best), and that with their scale, they could train searchers how to search (think about query + zip code).

Yet with the ability for anyone to create content, the concept of content filtration becomes even more important that simple algorithmic search or searcher education. Which creates the rise of influence online. People have become filtration points.

Which has fundamentally changed how people interact with the web. Less and less people are using iGoogle or MyYahoo or Google or a portal to start their online experience. More and more people are starting their experience online with the blog or site that influences them most.

The web has become about people, and influence is the new hotness.

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