What is social search and why is it such a big deal? Chris Sherman defines it as ”Internet wayfinding tools informed by human judgment” and he thinks these tools are responses to the fact that algorithmic search has plateaued.

Humans are still better at some things than search engines. Flickr is an example of this. Volunteers to a great job tagging images for findability, a job that computers couldn’t do because they are no good at interpreting images.

Chris Sherman has been blogging about social search on Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land for quite some time. He gave a compact and enlightening introduction to the theme at the Social Search Overview session at Search Engine Strategies in New York 2007:

Social search isn’t new

Chris Sherman reminded us that we’ve always had social search services. Tim Berbers-Lee created the first guide to the web in 1990 by gathering and organizing links to those few web sites that were available. Yahoo! was originally a directory developed by a group of friends and perhaps the first real social search service.

Meta tags were intended as a way for webmasters to help search engines to find their way. They were a massive failure. Now we’ve come full circle and we’re back to tagging.

Algorithmic search is social: Fundamentally, search engines reflect human bias (programmer choices). Search engines even observe human behavior – click paths, popular URLs etc. – and use this to modify their algorithms.

Types of social search

There is a multitude of sites and services out there that can be said to offer social search. Chris Sherman sorts them into these categories:

• Shared bookmarks and web pages (Del.icio.us, Shadows, Furl). For more info see Top 5 social bookmarking services.
• Tag engines, tagging and searching blogs and RSS feeds (Technorati, Bloglines).
• Collaborative directories (ODP, Prefound, Zimbio and Wikipedia). Wikipedia doesn’t have a directory structure but it is edited by volunteers like ODP and is used in similar ways.
• Personalized verticals (Google Custom Search, Eurexter, Rollyo).
• Collaborative harvesters (Digg, Netscape, Reddit and Popurl, which aggregates these and more).
• Social Q&A sites (Yahoo Answers, Answerbag).

Problems of social search

The real reason for the popularity of social search is that it solves some of the problems of algorithmic search. I don’t care if I get one million or two million results for my Google search. All I really need is a handful or two of really good matches. Often, social search comes closer than the huge crawler based indexes.

But social search has its problems. The most critical is scale and scope. You need critical mass to harvest the collective wisdom.

There are also tagging issues. Lack of a controlled vocabulary and he ambiguity of language (orange = fruit or orange = color?) gives folksonomies some problems that taxonomies don’t have.

And not to forget: Old fashioned laziness or even stupidity can and do often create problems in the form of bad tags or missing tags.

What does the future hold?

What will ultimately work? Chris Sherman thinks the one of the long-term effects of the social search phenomenon will be increased personalization and user control over result filtering.

He also sees a future for services offering a combination of algorithmic and people-mediated search and for trust networks like Linked-in.

The most important role of social search in the foreseeable future will probably be organizing non-text content like images and movies.

More of Pandia’s Search Engine Strategies coverage.