What Is Social Search?

[rockcoastmedia]

Moderator Note: Thread split from The OFFICIAL SES San Jose 2006 Conference Thread

Does anyone remember who the speakers were at the Social Search: Up Close with Yahoo?

[pleeker]

Originally Posted by rockcoastmedia

Does anyone remember who the speakers were at the Social Search: Up Close with Yahoo?

As I recall...

Tim Mayer
Yumio Saneyoshi (Answers)
Joshua Schacter (del.icio.us)
Kakul Strivastava (Flickr)
Asish Baldua (TripPlanner)

My spelling might be off....

[AussieWebmaster]

Beat me to this but Barry has what they discussed too:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/004310.html

[rockcoastmedia]

Thanks you for pointing me in the right direction.

[rickm]

"Social search" was certainly a buzz word at SES San Jose. But, what is it? Chris Sherman gives a working definition in his introduction. It must be a new term because I couldn't find it in Wikipedia, and MySpace doesn't have a profile for it yet In my two minute survey of the web, I am coming across many newfangled tools and services. It seems social search is becoming monetized as it unfolds. Social search, almost by definition, should be grassroots. So, I'm curious to hear from the end-user what they think social search is? Maybe they just do it, and its not even part of their vocabulary.

[Megham]

The idea of social search has been around a long time. For example, visionaries like Dr. Vannevar Bush, wrote back in the 1940's about users creating a interlinked web. He dreamt of a device called a “Memex”, an enhanced supplement to personal and community memory created by trailblazers: those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.” http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush.

The fact that the idea of 'social search' is surfaced as a term is mainly because technology has now allowed this to happen.
It is very exciting to see how new social search tools impact upon our community.

It's been interesting since we launched Trexy.com, to see how our users have benefited from what others have searched for online and what they have found.

[rockcoastmedia]

A great comment by one of the panelists at SES in the Social Search Overview at San Jose was, "There is no official definition yet for social search". However, the idea is concrete, social search in its essence is Human beings finding web sites, and telling others about those sites. It also entails users making judgments about the usefulness of sites and telling others.

This analogy may be a bit simplistic, but I think Google was on to something with PR. Social search is like PR on steroids.

[rickm]

how does PR generate personalized content or reflect the opinion of society? I don't think it is engineered to improve relevancy through human knowledge and real world understanding—where's the feedback loop? seems it's more of a top-down perspective than a grassroots one. but, PR certainly awakens some of our competitive natures

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by rickm

how does PR generate personalized content or reflect the opinion of society? I don't think it is engineered to improve relevancy through human knowledge and real world understanding—where's the feedback loop? seems it's more of a top-down perspective than a grassroots one. but, PR certainly awakens some of our competitive natures

PR is Larry's Page Rank - nothing more... many have a over emphasized opinion of what PR really means...

Goole has and is always trying to stay to the random surfer theory.... your site in the overall scheme of things and how an unskilled searcher would find you... not by search but by the links on other people's websites... inbound links increases the probabilty... especially from other authority sites... giving a link to a site you respect that has high rank in your space can at times score you some points... there is a lot to this that does not meet the eye.

[dannysullivan]

Chris Sherman also finished two big articles on the subject that would be helpful for those who want to discuss the topic more. See:

What's the Big Deal With Social Search?

and

Who's Who in Social Search

Also for recaps of the social search tracks at SES San Jose, see:

103 Links About SES San Jose 2006 (AKA The Big Recap)

Scroll down, and there's a section in there that lists all the session coverage.

[Webvisitor]

I am curious if anyone knows what happened to LookSmart's Furl "PeopleRank sm" algorithm. I know Stanford University had papers out using the term years ago. I also read on Battelle's Searchblog a post where it looked like he had coined the term.
Did Stanford wrestle the service marked term from the Furl team?
I look forward to the day we see a UGC algorithm that covers all tagged pages. One that will take into account spammers works and adjusts accordingly.

[Wilksy]

What do you guys think, is Social Search really Search? Or is it a new form of marketing??

Originally Posted by rockcoastmedia

This analogy may be a bit simplistic, but I think Google was on to something with PR. Social search is like PR on steroids.

I am very new to all that but I did setup links on my blogs for all these social groups hoping to build traffic (just playing around really master the web ).

I would rather use the term "word of month on steroids" as people do not get paid this is all voluntary (actually making the whole thing far more valuable than PR no disrespect meant here).

Cheers,

[Megham]

Originally Posted by Wilksy

What do you guys think, is Social Search really Search? Or is it a new form of marketing??

The term 'Social search' refers to the collaboration among users. It has completely different from 'search marketing' which is about how a company or website owner can increase exposure to their webpages through search engine listings.

Social search tools all have community aspects to them and require the involvement of users to make them really useful and usually it's the users who determine whether or not they keep using it.

[SEMBasics]

I think what rockcoastmedia may have meant is that PR looks at links as a vote of confidence in a web-page, although not all "votes" are equal, and in that sense it has a social search aspect.

Here is an article on Wired Magazine which discusses the process of how Larry Page came up with PageRank (thanks to mcanerin for showing us the link). It is based, in part, on the importance of citations within the academic community and as such is based on a type of social media network (just an offline version).

Finally, I'll quote from Chris Sherman's article What's the Big Deal With Social Search?

Indeed, Google's famous PageRank algorithm, which analyzes the link structure of the web and assigns more importance to pages with many "high quality" links pointing to them, is fundamentally a form of social search. Why? Because PageRank is relying on the collective judgement of webmasters linking to other content on the web. Links, in essence, are positive votes by the webmaster community for their favorite sites.