Social search is web search aided in some way by social networks. Google (NSDQ:GOOG) launched its own social search last week. Who else is on this scene and how can social search help you find what you are looking for?

What kind of sites came into consideration for this short list of great social search engines? I have not been looking at sites that simply index social networks. I’m not looking for simply for information from social networks. I want search tools for general web search powered by information from social networks.

The sites on this list all search information that has been recommended by someone, and to some degree this recommendation influences the way the search results are listed. This brand of search engine give you search results that appeal to real people, not just search engine spiders. And the winners are:

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If you have the chance, go to Las Vegas on November 10 to 13 to take part in an intense search engine marketing learning arena.

It started in 2001, in London. Search engine marketing enthusiasts met at the Cittie of Yorke pub to discuss the search scene and have fun. There were no speeches or stands, just a lot of networking.

Image: Keynote speaker Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.

From Pub Conference to PubCon Las Vegas

Since 2001, Webmaster World has developed a large scale conference version of the pub gathering: PubCon. This year PubCon returns to Las Vegas, giving participants a new chance to learn about the search engine scene, listen to experts and network with fellow search engine marketers.

It all starts on November 9 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, with a networking “kick-off blast”. The next three days there are a large number of parallel sessions covering a lot of topics of relevance to internet and search engine marketing.

Session tracks

There are several tracks, including:

• Search engine optimization for organic search
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Social media marketing (including Twitter)
• Affiliate marketing
• The Webmaster World (coding, ecommerce, video etc.)
• Interactive Site Reviews
• Emerging Media (mobile, viral, video)
• Analytics and measurement
• Advertising, branding and PR
• Social, brand and reputation management
• Linking
• Forums & communities: building, management, and optimization

Among the speakers you’ll find people like Tony Adam and Jeff Arena of Yahoo!, Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal, Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim, Jim Boykin, Aaron Wall, Bruce Clay, Matt Cutts and Frederick Vallaeys of Google, Rand Fishkin of SEOMOz, Vanessa Fox, Nathan Buggia from Bing, Todd Friesen, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Elisabeth Osmeloski of Search Engine Land and many, more. Brett Tabke, the leader of it all, is obviously also there.

Click here for more information about PubCon.

Is Google’s Social Search as creepy as Halloween? That’s one of the topics found in this week’s search engine news. You will get our response on Tuesday. While waiting you may like to take a look at these stories:

• Google’s Creepy Social Search

  Google released Social Search, which prioritizes results from your friends’ Twitter feeds, FriendFeed updates, Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, and Picasa libraries. (PCMag Oct 10 2009)

• Bing loses users faster than impressions, says Chitika

  Users’ share down to 5.44% in October from 6.7% in August (CBR Oct 30 2009)

• Google quashes rumours it’s making an Android handset

  Google’s Android chief has put the kibosh on rumours that the search giant is creating its own phone. (cnet UK Oct 31 2009)

• Chinese Newspaper Accuses Google of ‘Malicious Revenge’

  The official newspaper of the Chinese communist party has accused Google of intentionally blocking access to its website by displaying an allegedly unnecessary malware warning (ISE db Oct 30 2009)

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Google adds new music search features to its regular web search and plans to open an online ebook store next summer.

Google’s economic success has been based on its pay-per-click text ads. You will find such ads accompanying search results, emails in Gmail and so on. Any company relying on only one revenue stream is vulnerable, though, which is one reason Google (NSDQ:GOOG) is trying to diversify.

Selling books and ebooks

Recently Google announced that it is going to launch an online ebook store, called Google Editions.

That makes perfect sense. Since Microsoft gave up on its book scanning program, Google is the only serious contender for the book search throne. A lot of people already use Google Book Search to find information about books: reviews, excerpts and in some cases, complete online copies of books.

Through agreements with book sellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble they already provide links to online shops that sell physical as well as digital books. What could be more natural that to sell books directly from Google’s sites, getting a larger piece of the pie?

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The concept of network neutrality is that all internet content should be treated equally. This means that the content is treated and transmitted in the same way regardless of who uploaded it, who is downloading it, or what type of data it is. Advocates see network neutrality as the fundamental right of all users to have equal access to the internet, having control of what content they view and the tools that they use to view that content.

photo credit: gualtiero

By guest author John West

It is already happening

Internet service providers (ISPs) act as a gateway, giving users access to the internet for everything they use it for (emailing, VoIP phone calls, web browsing, file sharing). However, there are fears that ISPs are acting as gatekeepers and are filtering internet content, breaching the fundamental principle of network neutrality.

The primary concerns of network neutrality advocates is the possibility that ISPs are able to enforce data discrimination and that they could favour certain traffic, such that the sites and services of a favoured organisation would reach the user very fast, with data from other sites travelling at much slower speeds. The fear is, of course, that large, established, powerful companies would be able to pay to have their services delivered quickly, whilst small organisations and start-ups would be left languishing, severely restricting competition and the potential for innovation.

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If you spend a lot of time online doing research, pursuing your hobbies or otherwise finding and retrieving information, you could find yourself visiting a lot of search engines and tending to a large number of accounts like RSS readers and bookmarking tools. 43 Marks is a new service that offers web search, bookmarking and RSS aggregation — all in one place.

Search

The search tool is simple but convenient. You can do the same search on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Wikipedia with just a click. On the downside, the search results are from Google Custom Search and similar services, so there is no way to extend your search to include news, blogs, images etc.

Bookmarks

When you sign up for an account with 43 Marks, you find lots of pre-defined bookmarks in twelve categories including shopping, movies, email, travel and more. You are free to delete or add bookmarks, to rearrange the order of bookmarks and categories and to add more categories as needed.

Unfortunately, there is no way to import or export bookmarks. So if, like me, you have hundreds of bookmarks stored in another service, moving to 43 Marks will take some work.

RSS

The third section on your 43 Marks home page contains RSS feeds. It is easy to add, remove and rearrange feeds to gather all your favorite feeds in one place.

There is no way of importing OPML files (for those who already have a set of RSS feeds on another service). And there is no way of organizing feeds in folders if you have a large number of feeds.

To sum it up

If you are starting out doing online research or if your interests are quite focused, 43 Marks provides a very convenient safe port for you to start your searches and collect your findings.

If you are an information professional, 43 marks is not likely to meet your needs. The search tools are not sufficiently advanced and the lack of import/export options is to limiting.

Twitter adds the possibility of organizing feeds into topic lists. Pandia tests the feature.

Twitter is already a useful search and research tool. The social microblog site has a decent search engine that lets you do real time searches in the topics people are interested in right now.

Finding the unknown unknown

However, for journalists and other intelligence gatherers another factor may be more important: If you subscribe to the most knowledgeable twitterers in your field, you will get access to top news you didn’t know you should have searched for.

If you are interested in search engines, for instance, experts like Danny Sullivan may feed you the very latest news. Pandia provides a feed that gives you the latest search engine news from this site.

The problem is that if you use Twitter to follow a large number of topics — or you follow a large number of people — your Twitter home page may become flooded with irellevant entries or tweets.

Group your tweeps

Now Twitter is testing a feature that will help you solve this problem. Some “tweeps” or twitter users have gotten a new feature on their Twitter page that lets them set up lists on a particular topic.

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Pandia has all the search engine news you can handle, and then some. Here’s what happened this week:

• Wolfram|Alpha Opens Up Paid API

  New API that will allow third-parties to access and display results from their database. (SE Land Oct 16 2009)

• Yahoo To Drop Paid Inclusion Program

  Yahoo has announced that their paid inclusion program will cease at the end of this year. (SE Land Oct 15 2009)

• Thoora – Discover what the world is talking about!

  Now, everyone can visit Thoora.com to find the news attracting the most attention and social reactions from the blogosphere, Twitter and traditional media sources. (Alt Search Engines Oct 16 2009)

• Google sparks e-books fight with Kindle

  The Web search giant said on Thursday it would launch Google Editions in the first half of next year, initially offering about half a million e-books (Reuters Oct 15 2009)

• Google Removes PageRank Data From Webmaster Tools

  Google: We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data (SER Oct 15 2009)

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