Social Search: Google and Me.dium

A number of new takes on social search have popped up.

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Looks like Google is experimenting with a crowdsourcing approach to socializing search results, based on some screenshots Adrian Pike sent to Techcrunch:

[Test feature shows social search may be on the way for Google | The Social - CNET News.com by Caroline McCarty]

Google has put out some official words on the test: "This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you'll continue to see those changes." Users can additionally suggest changes to search results, something that Google says may be shared with other users. The explanation added that users will probably only see this feature for a few weeks before it returns to the drawing board.

There's a Google FAQ for it too, explaining that the feature is called "Edit Search Results." And blogger Justin Hileman has posted a detailed account of his experiences with it.

Learning personal search preferences could not only help make results more relevant, but could also add to Google's vast library of personal data and preferences, potentially for ad-serving purposes. It could also be applied to other areas of search, like images, news, and video, which many critics argue are tougher to index by algorithm alone.

But this is interesting for another reason: the persistent rumors that Google might buy Digg and use its technology to breathe some new life into Google News, which hasn't been growing as quickly as some of the company's other products. If Pike's screenshots are any indicator, this may mean that Google has been working to build something similar in-house instead.

Hileman's observations are most interesting. He discovered that he could see other users' 'edits' of their search experience, as well as they seeing his apparently. Are comments next?

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Early this week, Me.dium announced a social search alpha based on Yahoo BOSS. I spoke with David Mandell of Me.dium and learned that the company has been experiencing very fast growth, with 5M users getting served 20M URLs/day.

I tried fooling with the alpha and it yielded not the greatest results:

"stowe boyd" - Me.dium Social Search Alpha, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I don't even know how to evaluate the results. It took me some digging to find out the meanings of the various iconic information indicators associated with each result. I suggest you contrast this with a Google search.

Then, I started getting script errors:

me.dium social search, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I think I will have to revisit when in beta form.

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Obviously, the Google experiment suggests a significant future for social search than the Me.dium alpha, but they are convergent trends.

It's not hard to blur your eyes and imagine a mashed up Google space, where my search experience is informed by my explicit manipulation of the results but also channeled by other Google managed information, like Google Reader, my Gmail, and other Google-managed social artifacts. This is very fertile ground indeed.

Comments

[justin hileman]

Comments are already here :)

check out this screen grab

Notice the grey icon at the bottom? It opens up a spartan little comment field, lets me annotate the search result. I haven't seen any comments by anyone else, but the "everyone's edits" page appears to have a mechanism in place for viewing them.

More screenshots and commentary here

[chris lintz]

Thanks for pointing out the script error. We have just fixed the issue. Expect this bug fix to be rolled out with our next release - most likely tomorrow. Happy searching :)

[Chris]

Thanks for mentioning in your piece, if you have any problems with the search please let us know. I am part of the community team at Me.dium and if you have any further comments, critiques, or questions about any of our products please send me an email at cmaller@me.dium.com Thanks again!