

Sergey Brin: We’ve Touched 1 Percent Of What Social Search Can Be - rblion
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/20/sergey-brin-weve-touched-1-percent-of-what-social-search-can-be/

======
acangiano
Social search is going to be big in the next few years. In light of this,
Facebook is a much more serious competitor to Google than Bing.

~~~
gnok
I keep hearing this phrase a lot but I'm not really sure I understand what it
means. What does 'Social search' encompass? Searching for people by their
attributes?

~~~
adrianwaj
Doing a search will have the top results being pages that friends, or friends
of friends have linked to, or retweeted.

In the results window you'll see what they said about it. You'll then have the
opportunity to contact those people (if they've got that setting on) - and in
time, you'll get new friend recommendations based on what you're searching and
clicking: so social search leads to search-based matchmaking. It could also
lead to interest groups, especially location-based interest groups from a
bunch of people in similar social circles, thereby leading to meetups.

You could also put out requests for help, and those requests for help will be
distributed to the right friends (by way of what they've been searching for
lately), so they can respond.

FB can feed their timelines into Bing (or their own search engine) so Bing can
go grab content in realtime as it's linked, rather than take the shotgun
approach spidering. And then FB would harness that system.

So basically social search gives a better picture on an individual's
interests, and how recent, or how long that interest has been to a person.
This where Google really needs to catchup: they should really see themselves
as a tiny startup against massive FB. They should see their users as
individuals amongst a group of friends, rather than as silos with intentions.
They should hire FB engineers, look to their own ranks for FB power users,
maybe even find some people who Zuckerberg has pissed off to help.

------
Uhhrrr
The title is interesting, but the article contains zero content beyond it.

