Search has changed. Online consumer information retrieval has reached another

inflexion point – a shift from pure algorithmic search to social search.

Searchers have become increasingly sophisticated, and basic algorithmic web

results are getting diluted out of most mainstream search experiences such as

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask. Search is not solved. At their most

sophisticated, users are still too often at a loss when executing a search.

According to Jupiter, 41.2 percent of users report that general search results

are often not directly relevant to queries, and 18 percent leave a search engine

without having found the information they were seeking.

First, there was basic algorithmic search (such as AltaVista), and then came

very predictable paid search business models to fuel innovation. The industry is

now maneuvering through its third era:



social search. Humans are still better at some things. Relevance remains

number one. Throughout the past decade, a search engine’s most critical success

factors – relevance, comprehensiveness, performance, freshness, and ease of use

– have remained fairly stable. Relevance is more subjective than ever and must

take into consideration the holistic search experience one user at a time.

Inferring each user’s intent from a mere 2.1 search terms remains at the core of

the relevance challenge

Social search addresses relevance head-on. After "on-the-page" and

"off-the-page" criteria, web connectivity and link authority, relevance is now

increasingly augmented by implicit and explicit user behaviors, social networks

and communities.

Monthly trend chart indicating the percentage

among total English-language blog posts that mentioned "social search". (Nielsen

BuzzMetrics BlogPulse)

What Is Social Search?

What is social search? To paraphrase Microsoft’s

Ramez Naam, it’s like every human

being is a neuron, and humanity as a whole is one giant brain, smarter as a

connected whole. If you can increase the ability of humans to communicate with

each other, you make the whole planet smarter.

As articulated by Chris Sherman, social search is information retrieval, way

finding tools informed by human judgment. Social search is people helping people

find stuff using plain-language questions and answers, collaborative content

harvesting, directory building, voting and ranking, sharing, tagging, commenting

on bookmarks, Web pages, news, images, videos and podcasts.

The wisdom of crowds – so well articulated by

James Surowiecki –

is at the root of emerging information retrieval tools. Search engines are

trying to resolve user intent more than content connectivity, and social search

adds a new relevance layer to information retrieval in the form of context,

freshness and some understanding of personal significance, personalization.

There is a shift underway from the few powerful elite to the empowerment of

the masses, from few-to-many to many-to-many publishing models with an explosion

in consumer-generated media. According to a Pew Internet and American Life

report, 44 percent of Internet users are content creators. A significant ratio

of the top 100 results for more queries are consumer-generated media such as

blogs and social networks, which sounds like an invitation for social media

marketers to seed more content. Internet users are getting a lot more

comfortable interacting with the Web, as illustrated by MySpace’s 159,271,726

profiles (as of February 28, 2007), and the web is getting a whole lot more

fluid and transparent. That said, not everybody needs to be tagging and voting

for collaborative efforts to reach critical-mass impact and benefit the rest of

us. There is a shift taking place from the head to Chris Anderson’s

long tail.

Social search offers a new discovery paradigm. Internet search is for getting

stuff done; it’s an in-and-out navigational tool. Search is also very much about

discovery browsing and community-driven recommendation engines. Discovery

browsing is entering a whole new navigation paradigm exemplified by companies

like StumbleUpon. The traditional

linear directory navigation model is broken. Most emerging social discovery

engines are adopting tag clouds as navigation tools that complement the search

box.

Altering Search’s Economics

Web 2.0 innovations are disruptive. The emergence of open standards, richer

user experiences, content portability, social networks and communities are quite

disruptive to traditional algorithmic search, and are converging toward social

search. Information retrieval is changing in real time. Web 2.0 open standards

have in essence separated the content we search from its format and dedicated

application. More and more frequently, information is being pushed to consumers

before they even have a chance to use a search engine to pull it from the Web.

AJAX and Flash are turning web pages into applications, themselves becoming

platform-independent mashups of RSS feeds, smart widgets, badges, and modules.

Aren’t we all spending more time in aggregators, emails, and applications that

automatically pull in information? Is the results page slowly getting

marginalized as the web’s main information retrieval space?

Social search levels the economics. The explosion of consumer-generated

media, the emergence of social search and the rise of the net’s culture of

participation will eventually force a democratization of the web’s economics.

Content-generating users, driving traffic and eyeballs, will increasingly share

the wealth. The web is slowly but surely leveling the playing field for the rest

of us in the tail. More and more personal blogs, MySpace profiles, and other

communities display advertising and widgets wrapped around democratization of

revenue share including payment. Consumers will eventually share the wealth in a

more democratic way. YouTube announced a revenue-sharing program with authors;

Bill Gates himself discussed rewarding users for searching. Content-generating

users are increasingly part of the economics as well. Eurekster already goes one

step further



suggesting how valuable swicky communities are, estimating that some

swickies could actually generate up to $30,000 a year in revenue to their owners

and be worth up to $300,000 if a buyer used typical methods for valuation.

Advertisers traditionally follow consumers. Social search is already

channeling significant amounts of traffic and should accelerate the pace of

brand advertising dollars shifting online. Internet sentiment analysis, buzz

monitoring and online reputation management could very well emerge as the next

significant search marketing era after search engine optimization and paid

search.

Conclusion: Search is the OS

Search is the operating system. If Web 1.0 was about getting online and Web

2.0 about collaborative networking, then Web 3.0 must be about making all of

this useful and productive. In more than one way, search is the internet OS

underlying most Web 2.0 applications. Search is the Internet OS connecting

disjointed pieces of data hosted in totally different places and creating

incremental knowledge value. Search is the Internet OS bridging communities and

enabling content experiences.

Search veteran Arnaud Fischer was AltaVista’s initial lead search product

manager and now is programming director with AOL

Search & Directional.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.