Searching Socially (not Social Search)

As an addendum to my previous post about social search I wanted to talk about one of the other things my project re-searchr.com does which is search socially. First off I had better come clean and explain what the heck the difference is between social search and searching socially. Here is what they mean to me (and re-searchr):

• social search: using your social networks explicitly to find the answer to a query. Example, asking questions to your friends.
• searching socially: using your social networks to influence standard web searching. Example, re-weighting search results based on how many times your friends socially bookmarked sites in the search results

Social search is very explicit, while searching socially can be much more subtle.

I think that searching socially is going to be a big deal in the future. The best filter for content that one has is through trusted sources, why do I listen to This Week in Technology, because they have proved that I can trust their judgements. Why do people listen to Warren Buffet? Because he has proven that he is highly trustworthy in the field of investments. Trusted sources for the bulk of us (who aren't Robert Scoble) can be found in our social networks. They are people we have made the explicit decision to listen to, probably not because we think they are stupid and untrustworthy, more likely because we value their opinions.

Once we have established who are trustworthy friends are we can start to mine our relationships and apply it to search. The very simplest example is to take a default set of search results form google and find out how many times a given search result url has been mentioned by our social networks. That immediately establishes more value for results that are mentioned more than for results that are mentioned less. Why? Well, not simply because the results were mentioned more, but because they were mentioned more by people we trust.

This simple example is just the beginning we can start to mine sentiment out of our friends comments and then define not just mentions but good and bad mentions for re-ranking. We can also look at how many times a domain was mentioned for more aggregate rankings. We can expand out a shell around our friends, going layer by layer through the social graph for more information.

The important thing to note here is that searching socially will require nothing more from the searcher, than having affiliated social networks and giving access to them. This kind of interaction is ideal as most users (self-included) are lazy and do not want to have to do much work to start getting advantages.

To summarize, social search and searching socially are different, and re-searchr is trying to do both.