SES 2006: Social Search Overview
Managing editor Mike McDonald of WebProNews filed this exclusive look at the SES 2006 San Jose session on social search.
Chris Sherman opened the session by defining social search, calling it a collection of Internet wayfinding tools informed by human judgment. That judgment takes place in the form of tags, click-through activity, search history, and other actions.
That may be as good as the definition gets for some time. There isn’t a standard definition for social search yet, and a lot of companies big and small would not mind being the ones to shape it.
Sherman credited World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee with being the first to create a guide that was the earliest form of social search. At that point, search engines were inefficient; algorithmic search methods had not arrived yet.
Fast forward from 1990 to 2006. Social search is having an impact. "Increasingly we’re seeing search engines coming out with personalization efforts," said Sherman. "That data is going to be fed back into the loop and impact the general search."
"What search engines are doing is saying, ‘hey lets tap into this huge resource of user brainpower’ to improve search results."
What is Social Search?
One can split up what social search is today into several categories:
Shared bookmarks (Delicious, Furl)
Tag engines (blogs RSS - Technorati, Bloglines)
Collaborative directories (ODP, Prefound, Zimbo, wikipedia)
Personalized verticals (Eurekster, Yahoo Search Builder)
Collaborative harvesters (Digg, Netscape, Popurls.com) that focus on news, etc.
Social Q&A sites (Google Answers, Yahoo Answers, Answerbag)
Social search has hit some problems along the way. The scale and scope of information has grown so much that automation, like Yahoo Search, has had to take the place of the original hand-edited manual directory.
"I’m not sure people, even millions of people, ARE going to be able to keep up with all this information," said Sherman.
The ambiguity of language has led to tagging issues. "On the Web we don’t have controlled vocabulary, even if we did, we aren’t going to use it," Sherman commented, and he is right about that.
Human laziness and search spider dumbness make things difficult, too. But the worst problem comes from those who exploit whatever they can online for personal gain - the spammers.
