Author: Joe Whyte

Today I was checking out some things over at wikipedia just to keep tabs on them trying to take over the world. Well to my surprise I found a page that is requesting wiki members and developers to start creating a user defined search engine. The founder of wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) is attempting to make a search engine that fixes the “broken” search industry that is alive today. From what Jimmy is saying is that he wants PEOPLE to do what any Algorithm cannot which is probably something like Social Search. Social Search is something that Google, Yahoo and MSN have already talked about and is something that is already in development. Social Search IS the future of search but when will it be realized and will it ever be a stand alone search engine with no help from an algorithms? I think not! The time it will take for all possible search results to be customized to a user’s search behavior is a life long process so there still needs to be something that can make Social or “personalized” search move quicker and smarter.

To get a general overview on social search, see this great article over at SEroundtable.com.

Here is information about .
Google’s way of utilizing social search is allowing a tracking system to follow you while you search. So if you are doing a search for cooking and you click on 2 results on the first page and 4 results on the second page then when you perform that search using “personalized search” you will have all of the results you clicked at the top of YOUR search so you dont have to digg to find them. This technique makes for a personalized Search Engine Results page FULL of results that are relevant to what you are looking for.

Here is Yahoo! Getting social: I have not seen any beta for yahoo social search YET, if someone does have a sneak peak on this please let me know. I do know that Yahoo! is starting to create a social search beta program and it seems that they definitely know the power of social search and have their eyes focused on the future of search.

Here is MSN getting social: With MSN I have not found an actual beta test for their Personalized or social search engine. MSN see’s the power in social search so they are too gearing up to create a social search engine utilizing the power of the end user.

With the links above you can see the emphasis put on social search amongs all of the major search engines. Its clear that social search is going to be the future of search as it can provide much more accurate results. Social Search is definitely a much more exact way to search for the INDIVIDUAL but there are still a ton of variables that need to be considered to make this successful. Google’s current “personalized search” is a good start but still very flawed as it sends a bot to track my current movement in the serps. For a user to completely rely on Googles personalized search this BOT would need to know what the user would PROBABLY click on for any given search term. The problem with personalized search is that it will only pull relevant results on search terms you have ALREADY searched for. In conclusion, WIKIpedia’s jimmy wales is not creating something that HAS not been thought of before he is just doing it wiki style .

2006 was a big year for social search and I predict that social search will continue to be a large topic in 2007.

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