“Social Search” Generally Isn’t
In attending this SDForum SearchSIG event tuesday night, I was keen to learn what Wikia, FriendFeed, Mahalo, and Facebook were doing about social search. As it turns out - and as I pointed out during the Q&A to lively discussion (which I think was recorded but doesn’t seem to be posted yet) - the answer is nothing much.
My premise in making that comment was that social search be defined as a search deriving its results from “a statistically meaningful sample of people meaningfully related to me”. I gave as an example Zagat’s guide to NYC restaurants, which, back in the day, was exactly that - a usefully large group of, mostly, actual foodies.
Mahalo, imho, is simply an extension of the editorial approach into semi-pro range. Instead of one food editor of the NYTimes, you could have, I don’t know, 10?, editors of the NYC pages. Wikia, simply the cult of the amateur doing the same thing. In both cases, these are curated results pages. If the curators are competent, passionate, and/or otherwise motivated, this is great and a step forward from algorithmic results. But making better results pages ain’t social search.
Neither is telling me what my friends think. Sure twitter lazyweb is a great way to get a recommendation for an indian restaurant in Palo Alto, but it’s a lousy way to get one for a dentist in missoula. Especially if you don’t live there and have a bunch of friends there.
Even del.icio.us and other “social search 1.0″ tools are still, more or less, dumb boxes of votes. Those votes are by smart people and often people like me (hence why I find delicious popular interesting), but there’s no variability on a given query on the axis of “social”. And, like mahalo and wikia, the results are mostly url’s - i.e. links to other pages where you as often as not have to execute another search or dig through socially undifferentiated data to extract value (a link to a restaurant page on yelp, for example, with a bunch of reviews from people I don’t know or trust).
There are a bunch of tools that let you ask questions of people. LinkedIn does a great job of this, again within a specific community, but they are very clever in the way things can seep out beyond the first degree network without hitting the undifferentiated population of “everyone”. That said, it’s still an expansion of “me”, on the assumption that my business colleagues and their business colleagues are to some degree usefully alike. While somewhat true, this is not nearly as useful as a larger population of people “like me,” who might or might not be related to me socially.
Lijit is doing a similarly interesting and useful job of letting me search the corpus read by my network, and with a little help from MyBlogLog and del.icio.us, my network’s network. Lijit is awesome, and I often use it to search my own stuff.
But what I really would like to see from “social search” is something that can search my network/neighborhood AND search other neighborhoods like mine, where “like mine” is pivotable based on context (friends, business, geo, special need, etc.). Like last.fm for stuff other than music maybe.
(I’m barely commenting on Friendfeed and Facebook because, to date, those are seredipitous discovery tools more than search ones, and ultimately you’re mostly finding people, not useful data derived from groups of people.)
Is anyone doing anything interestingly like this?
July 10th, 2008 09:49
[…] http://gregcohn.com/blog/uncategorized/2008/07/social-search-generally-isnt/ asks Hoosgot, […]
July 10th, 2008 17:11
Its great to see an Echo Park Yahooer’s perspective on social search now and what it could be. When considering new media and social networking tools, its critical to include the business nuts and bolts numbers as they apply to the typical blog Publisher too. I.E., as a Publisher your sites statistics and revenue remain a commodity to be respected and compensated fairly for their use by any entity.
Along with consideration of functionality is the critical sanctity of Publishers private statistics. We at P.U.B. consider the safety of the information any app or widget(s) may be gathering, unbeknownst to the unwitting Publisher who installs them.
P.U.B. [Publishers Union of Bloggers] has pending inquires to Widget Providers concerning how they generate their income and what percentage of this income goes to the Blog Publisher making the critical decision to allow a Widget on their site for their readers. In addition we are requesting transparency on the critical issue of how the private statistic from Publishers Blogs are being used, hopefully with the Publisher’s permission!
P.U.B. expects to hear back from Lijit on these financial and private statistics issues from P.U.B’s inquiry we sent to Lijit in mid April 2008. When we get this response from Lijit Networks we will let great Blog Publishers like you know their exact revenue/statistics sharing deal. Currently we are also working with Blog Publishers to track performance hit evaluations of Widgets too.
Will publish these results to keep the community of Blog Publishers informed on this critical component of Widgets on our Blogs. Thanks for being a publisher with your unique perspective.
Barney Moran for P.U.B.
July 12th, 2008 23:59
Hey Greg, good post.
I know of several companies in stealth mode that are working on a social search business model, but I can tell you that none of them are close to the bravado they originally spoke.
I remember hearing at conferences that Facebook would soon challenge big players like Google, MSFT, and Yahoo with search. I’ve yet to see it happen. As a matter of fact, Sergey and Larry from Google used to be criticized for their “crazy” AI theories when they spoke about them in public.
Weren’t they foreseeing a more complex contextual search, like search technology that leverages the social graph?
I think that a big player, like Yahoo for example, could theoretically trace your searches to your Yahoo account, compare against your yahoo contact’s and open social data, and perhaps make your search 0.01% more relevant.
Then again, I search for some weird and random stuff, so probably not.
There is massive value in social networking, it’s just not going to come from the likes of Facebook, or MySpace. Those networks are good at managing friend networks, not shopping, searching, or some form of data analysis.
Want to know where I think the massive value lies in social networks, and its completely untapped for the taking?
The true power of social networks will be revealed the instant one entire group of friends (10,000) on Facebook decides it is in their interest to act together, then you will understand what I am talking about. 10, 100, even 1000 cars purchased from one dealer will not get you a radical discount…
…but 10,000? There are so many massive business models waiting to tap social network marketing power, but someone has to have vision, resources, and charisma to be the catalyst.
Think of health care, and our ability to vouch for each other through social networks. Make no mistake, that will come very soon, and that is where the opportunity of social networks are to me. Everyone’s just busy with the quick and easy bullshit apps like “kiss me and I’ll punch you in the face”, praying to get a little advertising dollars for a quick laugh. Sad really…
I think we’ll see social networks and internet tech have the biggest boom, ever, in about 7 years, when our problems get so bad that we HAVE to share resources with others.
I’ve got so much opportunity on my plate, but no knife and fork. That’s why I joined TechStars I guess, because they lent me a single chopstick and that’s all I need!
Take it easy Greg.
July 21st, 2008 10:18
Me.dium recently released a social search engine that does a lot of the things you are talking about. It uses what people are searching and have searched to produce the most relevant results. The way people can help influence results is to download one of Me.dium’s social toolbars or sidebar. The more people that do this, the better the results become.
Me.dium’s Social Search, which leverages the Yahoo! Search BOSS platform, provides an entirely new level of information on top of traditional search. Me.dium’s Social Search harnesses the activity of the crowds to let you find information that has relevance based on what people are actually surfing right now.
Me.dium’s technology lets the inherent activity of real people - not robotic crawlers - determine relevance. Me.dium’s Social Search results show what people are surfing and find interesting, right now. While other search engines base relevance on how content links across pages, Me.dium’s Social Search shows you the most popular news, reviews, pictures and videos that other people are actually looking at in relation to your search term. And as the activity of the people online changes, so do the search results.
August 2nd, 2008 18:19
Thanks !
August 13th, 2008 11:13
*The Me.dium search engine uses what people are surfing and have surfed on the Internet to compile the most relevant results.* Sorry about the typo.
August 29th, 2008 08:18
There is something a little worrying about social networking becoming too open… hence facebook being an easier pill to swallow than myspace