Everybody altogether now: social search!

Posted Jun 15th 2006 7:24AM by Sarah Gilbert
Filed under: Products and Services, Launches, Internet, Competitive Strategy, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), Time Warner (TWX)

Yahoo! and Netscape, oh my! Both are diving head first into the concept of "social search," integrating the mysterious ranking systems of the search engine with the cool democratic nature of the social bookmarking site. As Time Warner was preparing to launch its beta version of the new Netscape, Yahoo! was talking about integrating del.icio.us and flickr, two very very grassroots-y and user-driven properties, with the unknowable algorithms behind its search engine.

Jeff Weiner of Yahoo! says his social search will "tap the untapped authority of users" while Jonathan Miller of Netscape says "We want to marry the great editorial skill of humans and what systems and software can do to create something that is different and better."

These ideas are good and pretty but I have to wonder: how is this any different from how Google has given more weight to blogs in its search engines? How is this different from giving weight to incoming links (which are the most democratic of all democracies)? Yahoo! thinks I am the untapped authority, but really, I'm quite respectably tapped with some 8000 visitors a day to my personal blog: all through the power of my content. And I'm just the tip of the iceberg, other bloggers who fit the category are cashing checks from Google every month.

It's all lovely, and fun, and a good idea. But social search is just a new way of creating a network effect, and the end result will be no different whether you're getting popular through votes or links from your ever-expanding group of friends.

Tags: flickr, goog, google, netscape, netscape beta, NetscapeBeta, new netscape, NewNetscape, search, social, social bookmarking, social search, SocialBookmarking, SocialSearch, yahoo answers, yahoo search, yahoo!, YahooAnswers, YahooSearch, yhoo

Print this

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

6-15-2006 @ 11:50AM

Steve Mansfield said...

Social search has a much larger potential than what is mentioned here. The promise of social search is to utilize User Shared Search Results (USSR's) to eliminate search "chaff" (all the links on every SERP that are not relevant to your query) and to have all the search results organized based on your social profile and the click behavior of your community (anonymous and direct) rather than the old Pagerank systems which are at their technical breaking point based on the size of the databases being searched and are constantly corrupted by SEO efforts. The combination of these technological structures have the potential to return hyper-relevant results compared to what users have been conditioned to accept up to this point. Imagine a social search engine that returns results of your query that start with groups of links other users (that are demographically like you) have already found and organized about your query, then follows that with lists of traditional search results that are organized related to your interests first and then the click behavior of other users like you on the search results presented. It's an entirely new paradigm in search that has the potential to offer users a service that is far beyond what we've seen so far. I would not underestimate the impact of what Yahoo is doing. Further, keep in mind that Google is also proceeding down the social search path by introducing their Google Co-op and Google Notebook technologies. This is an important evolution in search.