Serendipity35

I tune in to the use of the word "serendipity," especially when I see it used in the context of media and tech. A rather odd usage of late has been using it to mean showing people what they want even if they didn’t ask for it.

There is none of that in the traditional definition: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. I used it as the name for this blog for that and other reasons. Its origin comes from 1754 when it was coined by Horace Walpole as suggested to him by "The Three Princes of Serendip" - the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

Jeff Jarvis has defined serendipity as “unexpected relevance.”  Google's Eric Schmidt made a comment recently about Google as a “Serendipity Engine” (Facebook had different take on that). Schmidt said that it is part of Google's attempt to "give you your time back.”

We all agree that this is the age of information overload and of too much to do. So, Google comes up with Google Instant which is the "realtime search"  features that they launched. It only takes seconds off your search, but for Google, that's a few seconds times 2 billion searches a day.

Can search contain serendipity? Sure. My friend Steve believes in the serendipity of clicking links from site to site as being more than random. But Google wants your search serendipity to have an algorithm. This is a kind of personalized search where you serendipitous clicking really only seems to have happened by accident.

Some math types out there might want to point out here that serendipity and randomness is not really random.

If your online searching is guided underneath by knowledge of your personal preferences and history, the results may be closer to your intentions - but less serendipitous by my definition.

I would miss the serendipity of browsing a library or bookstore (especially used bookstores, one of my favorite places) and stumbling upon titles. How focused and conceived do you want your searching and surfing online to be?

It sounds like the evolution of search will include this. In fact, it may include searches that happen even when you're not using a "search engine."  When queries are running in the background based on what you have done and are doing online, that is what Google seems to mean by a “Serendipity Engine.”