Archive for October, 2006

Ask The Pro: What are social search engines?

Sunday, October 1st, 2006

This month‘s Pro is Kristen Day, Internet Marketing Consultant at OnYourMark, LLC. Kristen explains how “social” search engines are putting a human spin on search.

Internet search has always suffered from a lack of personality. While some search companies have tried to remedy this (the now retired Ask Jeeves butler comes to mind), cute mascots don’t fit the bill. The Open Directory Project uses volunteer human editors to review sites, but also requires editors to go through a review process. Once approved, many editors do not keep their categories current and end up being dropped from the ODP. A new breed of search engines are working to incorporate user opinions into search results. The goal of social search is to let users decide what is important, not a company or search algorithm.

del.icio.us is a popular social search site. Signing up for a del.icio.us account is free and requires the installation of a Firefox browser extension. As you surf websites, you can click the “tag” button to add a site to your del.icio.us account. Your del.icio.us account is a web-based list of bookmarks that you can access from any computer connected to the Internet. This is especially handy if you are not always on the same workstation.

When you add a site to del.icio.us, you can also write comments about the site. These comments can be viewed by other del.icio.us users to help them determine a site’s value. You can also add keywords that describe a site to “tag” it. When you search del.icio.us for a topic, del.icio.us will show you sites other users have tagged about the topic. A number with each website listing shows you how many other del.icio.us users have bookmarked the site. StumbleUpon and Spurl are bookmarking sites that work similarly to del.icio.us.

Eurekster lets users build topical search engines (also known as “swikis”) on their own websites. A website owner can install Eurekster and configure it to return websites on a specific topic. As users search the website owner’s swiki, Eurekster will log the links a searcher click on and rank the sites accordingly. You can try swikis from Eurekster’s swiki community at swicki.eurekster.com.

The social search concept of sharing and tagging is being used by many websites. digg is a news website that features articles submitted by its users. YouTube allows users to submit video, Flickr offers photo sharing and Frappr features custom maps created by users. All of these sites allow users to submit content and comment on content others have submitted.

Social search has downsides. Often spammers will abuse a social search site for commercial gain, adding redundant listings or tagging sites from multiple accounts to inflate popularity. Social search users don’t always contribute useful information or comments, cluttering search sites with useless pages. Neither traditional search engines nor social search sites are 100% accurate, but both offer avenues to help you find the information you need.

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