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Social Search
Thomas Hawk has a post up on Seeking Alpha about Yahoo! and social search.
To digress, I had no idea that Thomas posts at Seeking Alpha, a blog for wall street. That's cool. And it shows that blogs are bridging worlds like stocks and investing and photography and digital media that have not been bridgeable (is that a word?) in the past.
Back to social search. Thomas says in his post:
The problem is though that Yahoo! has not done a very good job integrating their various social network properties into the bigger picture. Still today, almost two years after Yahoo! bought Flickr you don't have Flickr photos indexed into Yahoo image search.
I beg to differ Thomas. The problem is that Yahoo! has a killer social search service inside of its company and has been keeping it under wraps for reasons unbeknownst to me.
If you didn't click on that link, then I'll tell you. Its delicious search and had delicious stayed independent, I would have urged them to launch a niche search engine on the backside of delicious. Call it socialsearch.com, call it askus.com, call it oursearch.com, it doesn't matter.
A URL, a search field, and an index that is created every day by people who find important stuff on the web that they want to remember and manually enter the keywords (tags) that they would use to remember it. That is social search. And it's been available for well over a year, hidden at http://del.icio.us/search.
Let's say you want to learn about slingbox. Here are three result pages.
Delicious Search:
Yahoo Search:
Google Search:
Delicious search returns more links above the fold, it shows you the Slingbox community service (this is social search after all), and a couple reviews, and a competitor called Orb. The two problems I see with Delicious search is it has duplicates which need to be removed and it is too slow. Search needs to be fast.
Google and Yahoo! get you to Slingmedia (the company) and Slingbox (the product) and that's about it above the fold.
Yahoo! should launch a social search engine. It should be nothing more than a search field. It should look like Google did at the begining. And it should use Delicious search results as the starting point. And then take it from there.
Comments (13) | Posted December 7, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
This is a very good idea. I have to admit, I think del.icio.us it total geekware. I am the admittedly odd techie that really has a very short attention span for tech that really isnt simple. Hence I havent embraced rss, I dont like de.icio.us, I use very few features on my phone, etc. In essence, I am a 30 year programmer that thinks more like a "boring" user.
That said, leveraging the geek power of del.icio.us for those that choose not to partake is a great way to make something like del.icio.us mainstream and allow more people to benefit from it. Unfortunately I dont think yahoo can find its own arse right now. Slim chance this will happen - notwithstnding the "shakeup".
Posted by: Hank Williams | Dec 7, 2006 7:56:46 AM
Fred - I've really enjoyed using Swicki, which I've put on my own blog as well as my work blogs:
http://news.onphilanthropy.com
http://flip.onphilanthropy.com
Great for creating community-based search & consumption around search phrases, which essentially become tags in a cloud above the search box. I think this is gonna be a huge space.
Posted by: Tom W. | Dec 7, 2006 9:34:29 AM
Fred -
I've got to ask a question that I've posed to you and others before re: tagging and search. Isn't there an inherent problem with relying on tagging since there is no guarantee that everyone will use the same nomenclature? For example, someone tagging items about New York could use the tag "NYC", "New York", "Big Apple", "New York City" or who knows what else. That lack of structure to the data is in itself a severly limiting factor - in my mind. Could you work out ways to scrub the data and create algorithms to wind your way around this headache? Sure! But on the flipside didn't we already HAVE directory search in the first iteration of Yahoo! and it was generally passed over for what we have now with both Yahoo and Google?
Posted by: rob | Dec 7, 2006 10:10:46 AM
I use delicious search all the time and for some things (ie opinions on products, community forums, etc) it is my first choice for results on user/consumer created data, plus I get to see links that I may have already bookmarked a few years back that I completely forgot I had already marked.
If they did decide to integrate this and really run with it though they need to make sure they don't clutter it with results from their other service (Flickr, etc). Portal-ization aside, if I am looking for photos please direct me to a SE for photos/images don't show me extra results related to a query I am looking for specific types of links for. Keep It Core. I hope they don't layer on results from the other services they own.
Posted by: Cyanbane | Dec 7, 2006 10:11:44 AM
I agree with you 100% I have been saying this for a year. I was actually surprised when they sold to yahoo as I thought they were on to something huge.
As far as finding detailed information like the avg. lifespan of males living in the Dominican Republic it doesn't work, but discovering killer tutorials, great articles there isn't a better way.
I think Wink caught on to this and is trying to do something about it.
Posted by: frum | Dec 7, 2006 10:57:02 AM
Yahoo! Search has shown MyWeb2 results for a long time -- certainly since before the delicious deal. Very useful, fast, and generally relevant.
Personally, though, I expect social search to have a big, short-lived boom, and then die off shortly after it all gets attacked by spammers.
Posted by: J.D. | Dec 7, 2006 11:20:38 AM
Good to read someone saying this. I think social search is Yahoo's big hope against Google. Without that GOOG's huge advantage in query volume should (might) allow them to innovate better than anyone else.
Posted by: Nic Brisbourne | Dec 7, 2006 12:03:16 PM
I wish someone would improve delicious search. It's missing about a million necessary features (like excluding terms, searching for results that contain a word in the url).
del.icio.us also has a huge bug like the fact that http://engtech.wordpress.com and http://engtech.wordpress.com/ are stored as two separate entries (note the last backslash).
Posted by: engtech | Dec 7, 2006 1:41:53 PM
Fred: I was thinking about that a while back and wondering if you could use the Delicious api to create a search engine on top of the data (bus dev w/o the hassles).
Rob: We thought about normalizing the tag data as well. One way is to provide a FF/ie plugin that gives a context sensitive pull down of tags (you start typing a tag and the pulldown automatically populates). The other way is to apply some algorithm to scrub/normalize the tags, probably with human oversight.
Social search is the next horizon in search functionality, the problem is that tagging is still very geeky. On the other hand, you probably only need a relatively small proportion of taggers to create a lot of utility for the much larger population of searchers.
Posted by: Joe Agliozzo | Dec 7, 2006 2:00:03 PM
Hi Fred.
"I beg to differ Thomas. The problem is that Yahoo! has a killer social search service inside of its company and has been keeping it under wraps for reasons unbeknownst to me."
I don't think we differ here at all. I'm not saying that Yahoo! doesn't have the ingredients to build a truly kick ass search product under the hood, they do. I'm saying that as of yet (like you, unbeknownst to me as well) they haven't executed. Delicious is one example. Flickr is another.
Flickr search results ranked by interestingness are so head and shoulders above what Yahoo! or Google have in terms of image search. And yet nearly two years after the acquisition (also with Delicious), they are not integrated.
Geeks like you and I will use delicious and flickr to find things. But in order to recognize the true power of the social network it needs to be simplified distilled and made available to the masses through very simple Yahoo! search. This integration has not taken place.
Now there are lots of reasons why this integration perhaps has not taken place. Like you I'm on the outside so I don't know the full story and Yahoo! is not very transparent about their plans in general in this area and more secretive than I'd like to see them personally.
But here are some thoughts as to why the integration of social search *may* not have taken place yet.
1. Politics.
2. Bureaucracy.
3. Lack of ambition, personal motivation.
4. Lack of the technical skills to pull it off. i.e. maybe Flickr, Delicious, upcoming, etc. can't handle the load. Or maybe Yahoo! can't develop technology that's fast enough to query social networks and their other indexed search stuff in the miliseconds that it must get it down to.
I am a huge believer in the power of social search. It works with delicious. It works with Flickr. It works with upcoming. But it is *not* being integrated into the general search platforms,for reasons unbeknownst to me. And this is where it needs to be implemented if Yahoo! hopes to use these tools to try and become more relevant than Google.
I certainly believe that Yahoo! has always had the intention to integrate social search in. Remember it was the search team at Yahoo! that bought Flickr not the more logical Yahoo! photos (who had passed on acquiring the company previously with almost certain political after the fact ramifications when the search team bought them).
"Yahoo! should launch a social search engine. It should be nothing more than a search field. It should look like Google did at the begining. And it should use Delicious search results as the starting point. And then take it from there."
I especially agree with you here 100% and they should do the same thing with Image Search using Flickr.
One of the biggest problems in the entire Google v. Yahoo battle in the first place is simply design. And like Google, delicious' design is far better than Yahoo Search. Yahoo Search is a cluttered mess. They need to simplify their search interface (delicious is actually a good model as is Google), super weight delicious, flickr (by interestingness) etc. rank results and prioritize them far ahead of Yahoo algorithm results, and then we will really have something slick.
Social search could be so powerful at Yahoo! but in order to really work, they have to be able to execute.
There are lots of things that Yahoo could do even beyond the above integration using human editors to make social search even better. In the world of image search at least, these are some of the problems that we are working on at Zooomr right now.
Posted by: Thomas Hawk | Dec 7, 2006 8:08:53 PM
Main value of a good search is a good search algorithm. Social or typical, good search results will depend on how well a machine can match a given phrase or word with the rest of the content on a web page or web site.
'Social search' will be just another dimention to a normal search and that will provide the best solution to searching in my opinion.
Thanks,
Jason
www.flexewebs.com
Posted by: Jason | Dec 10, 2006 1:14:36 PM
Hi Fred - I think Yahoo! can position its search as people-driven vs Google's algorithm-driven product. Yahoo! needs to take market share away from Google. Search is where the money is. Answers is a minor win. Not enough to get people to switch from Google to Yahoo! search. They need something bigger. I argued last month in my blog that they should either integrate del.icio.us in the front end or else use it in the back end to help rank URLs. I also think this could help their SERPs be "fresher" than other search engines. Either way, they can leverage their del.icio.us property to differentiate their search product from Google's.
Posted by: Richard Ball | Dec 12, 2006 3:55:45 PM
http://www.linkshouter.com
Posted by: Sebastia Samus | Mar 13, 2007 4:46:23 PM
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