Social Search

Class 15 

PDF Handout: class15_social_searches.pdf

What is a Social Search?

A social search is any search that is aided by a social interactions or connections.

The socialization of content refers to “user-generated content”, which is produced by blogs, wikis, social networks, podcasts, videos, photos, tags, ratings, voting, comments, personalized pages, etc.

Using this data in a search query may return better results, than traditional searched.

Traditional searches are based on:

• Web Links
•  Directories
• Keywords / Content
• Page Rank / Link Popularity

Drawbacks to traditional searches:

• computer  / not person
•  text on websites
•  user’s intention
•  stale content – takes a while for engine to find

Social Search = the end user  determines value of resource by the number of:

• links
• comments
• bookmarks 
• views
• votes
• tags

Social Media Applications contain fresh  information and resources:

• Social Bookmarks
• Social News
• Photo Sharing 
• Video Sharing

Tapping into the social media applications

can provide information as to what people see

as most important and relevant

Lecture Video: Overview of Social Search - 8:30 min 

Google prepares for social search

See 2008 article at: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_social_search_is_coming.php

oneriot.com – real time web and video search

Searches Twitter, Facebook, and Digg with just a 35-second delay between posting and indexing. Only the hottest, freshest results are delivered, making OneRiot.com "like, the Us Weekly of search engines!" They can find new content that has not yet shown up on Google (not acquired the page rank yet as it takes time to build up page rank)

Video: OneRiot - 3 min 

Eurekster is a pioneer and leader in social search technologies 

See video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzuaUYxwqfc

Scour is a social search engine that “scours” multiple other search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSM), with the goal of offering the most relevant search results. This is achieved through a combination of proven search algorithms and real user feedback. Scour also incentivises users to interact with points redeemable for Visa gift cards.

Video Scour: 1 min

Other social search applications: