Social searching

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article.
Please improve it or discuss changes on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.

This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since December 2006. (help, talk)

Social searching is an innovation in the search engine industry. Sprouting from web2.0 concepts like folksonomy or social bookmarking it gives the user the ability to interact with the search engine and promote what they feel are the relevant results. This is a user based approach website relevancy as opposed to the traditional webmaster based approach (ex: the basis of PageRank).Social search helps leverage one's network of friends and other trusted information sources to improve everyday web browsing and searching experiences. Some of the Social Search engines give continuous guidance from your network as you surf about whether or not the content you encounter is good, bad, or even dangerous.Simply put, social search tools are internet wayfinding services informed by human judgement.Wayfinding, because they're not strictly search engines in the sense that most people know them. And human judgement means that at least one, but more likely dozens, hundreds or more people have "consumed" the content and have decided it's worthy enough to recommend to others.Social search takes many forms, ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels to more sophisticated approaches that combine human intelligence with computer algorithms.

Eurekster, a nearly three-year-old search engine, sees so much promise in social search that it has based its whole business model on it. The engine allows users to build mini search engines, called swickis, that aggregate information on particular topics from sites they choose. "We completely agree with Yahoo that social search is the next generation of search," says Eurekster CEO Steven Marder. He uses the example of a teenager searching for skin care. On a swicki for teens, the teenager can find information relevant only to his age group. A general search would bring back results on wrinkles.

And despite all of the recent attention, social search isn't really new. 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.

Social search as it's evolving today incorporates both automated software as well as human judgments about the nature of web content. That's what makes social search intriguing—and fundamentally flawed, at least at this point.