Search going social

By Lynda Rathbone

Search engines are often as much a curse as a blessing these days, particularly in the minds of those who have experienced fruitless or unsatisfactory search results. Step right up and take your chances. If you’re lucky, your result will be on the first three or four pages. If not, you can always use your psychic abilities to try and predict what those who have labelled the site or document have actually called it. Until now.

Yahoo! has taken a concept that started about two years ago and applied it to its ever-expanding network of acquisitions in beta form to, hopefully, deliver a more relevant search result to the user. It’s called ‘social search’ and at time of writing, it’s so new it has yet to be entered into Wikipedia.

Social search works by taking contextual clues from who you are as a user of the search engine – where you live; what communities you are part of; what your preferences are; who your ‘buddies’ are; your past-purchasing preferences, and so forth. So, when you search, it ranks the results by interpolating those factors alongside the range of possibilities for your keywords. This delivers, in theory, a much more ‘localised’ or ‘contextual to you’ search experience.

An article on the concept, published in the January 23, 2006 online issue of BusinessWeek magazine, suggests that the social-search movement could represent a monumental shift in search technology. “Search technology has improved dramatically over the past several years but computer algorithms can only go so far in divining the intent of the user,” writes Ben Elgin.

This is due to the fact that the average web user will input only a couple of keywords into the ‘search box’. An individual, who taps in ‘Coldplay’, for example, could be looking for tour dates, the latest album, song lyrics or a history of the band. “Social search tries to fill this information gap by gleaning input and preferences from the communities with which the searcher is associated,” continues Elgin. “Someone seeking ‘Mexican restaurants’, for instance, would arguably be better served by results reflecting preferences of people in the same neighborhood…”

A breakthrough that Google embodied when it launched in 1998, most of today’s major search engines assess the link structure of the web when determining which sites are most relevant to the search. Therefore, a web page that has numerous other sites linking to it will usually rank higher than another with only a few incoming links. “Social search aims to shift power from web publishers, who create these links, to everyday internet users by examining their bookmarks or giving them tools to express their opinions.”

All this sounds great, but if you’re like me, then you won’t practice all this touchy-feely community stuff on a regular basis. And when I do, I try to come in anonymously with some crazy user name and skewed demographic information so that I can lurk to see what comes up first. I always tick the ‘no junk mail, please’ box and reset my cookies regularly.

Where does this leave social search? Still rocketing toward the future, I think. The users on the web today – the younger demographic – are embracing these networking and community sites, such as Myspace and Flickr, like crazy. They use their real names, post their pictures and tell each other exactly what they think. They are proud to share their opinions and their preferences – and that is the power of social search.

I predict that social search will soon become a useful tool to apply to our own online environments, especially those with diverse user sets or dispersed employee populations.

For example, with an intranet, you may be able to merge user behaviour throughout your network environment, take preferences from things like e-mail or base search results, in part, on employee profiles.

Externally, an organisation could apply this principle to their own local website search by participating in the social sites upon which the search is based. The organisation could also tap into any existing community resources (or start to foster its own), such as blogs or bulletin boards, to aide searchers in their quest for relevant results.

They could also copy what Yahoo! is doing – on a smaller scale – and create their own network of sites to come together for this purpose. Local and national government sites in particular, come to mind here.

Social search for Yahoo!, or anyone else for that matter, cannot be implemented overnight. The dynamic of group behaviour online is still in its infancy.

The site or business owners have traditionally been responsible for the content, publishing it, guarding it and ensuring it is letter perfect. Technologies like social search and wikis are turning that model on its head. Content is now being created outside and alongside traditional publishing models in many organisations – from e-mail dialogue to collaborative spaces to blogs.

For a long time, I have talked about how the critical step to usability on your site is context – and social search provides that in spades. In fact, it’s defining context in a new way by making it personal and locally based on who you are and where you’ve been online. The challenge is now to start building up the profiles of the users in order to offer a more user-friendly search experience.

While it’s still very early days, I think social search is one to watch. After all, what have we got to lose? One in 40,534 search results? I say, bring it on. n

Reference
‘Eight Tech Trends for 2006: Yahoo’s Social Circle’, Ben Elgin, BusinessWeek magazine, 23 January 2006.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2006/tc20060123_677239.htm

Lynda Rathbone can be contacted at: lynda@foursquaremedia.net.