The Biz of Coding

Is Google Contemplating Social Search?

by Ujwal Tickoo on March 16th, 2006

Till now Yahoo! has taken the leadership charge for Social Search. After releasing MyWeb (which I highly recommend) and acquiring social media start ups like Flickr and Del.icio.us Yahoo! has been working to improve search results for users by leveraging the users social networks.

In simple words social search means that if your social network consist of 31 people then the relevance and ranking of your search results could be possibly improved by reviewing relevant social media saved or referred to by these 31 people. One primitive scenario could be this: when you search for images with a keyword “fun” then it is quite possible that images tagged “fun” by individuals in your social network would be useful to you.

Here is a potential twister in the Social Search story that till now has been primarily driven by Yahoo! (when comparing GYM - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft). The removed footnotes from a slide (number 12) in Google’s 2006 Analyst Day Presentation (only PDF here) stated the following:

1. Encourage our large user base to actively contribute metadata that leads to better search results
2. Wiki of search: empower users/experts to improve search results in their domains of expertise — create a million verticals
3. Effectively integrate user feedback (ratings, comments, tags) into search

Further, one of the three bullet points on the next Slide (number 13 in the PDF) titled “Drive Search Innovation” says more:

“Encourage our large user base to actively contribute metadata that leads to better search results”

Interestingly, several industry watchers have stated that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have completely different approaches to Search. One well summarized post about a ZDNet article is by Greg Linden. However, with increasing pressure from various stakeholders on privacy issues, it is evident that Google needs to figure out alternative options to improve search results rather than solely pursuing the controversial “saving user data” approach. I think Google has something ups its sleeves. Time should soon reveal what it is.

POSTED IN: Google, Microsoft, Search, Social Search, Yahoo