CorpComms Magazine

There's one word that is starting to sum up the #NoSearch project: frustrating. It's only been two weeks and I'm already starting to wish I hadn't committed to two months doing this.

The thing is, it's not actually that difficult living without search engines if you have a sizeable and engaged social network of friends and like-minded contacts with similar interests. I can honestly say that in the course of fourteen days there have literally been only been a couple of occasions where I've been really challenged to find something out. The rest of the time my network has responded quickly and with good information. And if they haven't, I've been able to use other resources to find out what I want to know.

But what's causing me most consternation is how long it takes me to find information without using Google. Whereas normally I'd start typing into my browser and Google Instant would have me on a relevant website within a few seconds, I now have to ask people, or search though blogs in my RSS reader, or interrogate social bookmarking sites. It's altered a simple query from taking seconds to minutes, and when you work in a busy and dynamic PR agency like BOTTLE, those minutes are precious to me. The frustration has, at times, driven me to the verge of insanity (OK, I'm exaggerating, but you get the point).

What I have started to see is a real value in a side of social media that, admittedly, I've never taken that seriously or engaged with heavily before: social bookmarking. I'm seeing huge worth in Delicious and Diigo right now, and have started to pay more attention to Stumbleupon too. #NoSearch is revealing to me just why social bookmarking sites have so many devoted users, and I intend to investigate this more over the coming weeks with a view to developing bookmarking strategies for some of our existing clients.

Rather surprisingly, this project is also making me think in different ways. I'm currently heavily reliant on the social web and so, in theory, the more networks there are, the better. But it's not working like that. It's becoming very apparent to me that the social web is extremely fragmented and that the prevalence of social media sites simply isn't sustainable. I wrote a blog post last week entitled Are we over-connected? that seems to go against this project but that sums up my thoughts. We're starting to share every detail of our lives on multiple social networks, so will we all become tired of being so social?

Read more about the launch of the #NoSearch project

Paul Sutton is head of social communications at BOTTLE. Follow his experiment on the #NoSearch blog, help him out on Twitter or Quora, and check back here every Tuesday for an update.

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