The Social Search
Socially- referred traffic is becoming the next wave of internet searching; rather than just utilizing the standard Google search feature. Although social search is a relatively new term, just being introduced in 2004/ 2005 it has been extremely successful and a lot of people today value the opinions of others to rank an article. Connections to the social web are becoming more and more commonplace today. Users are able to favorite articles they like and thus the rankings of that article ultimately climb, thus leading to a higher social search ranking. Case in point is shown when an article is tweeted, how many times it is tweeted shows the level of success or Digg for instance where subscribers are able to rate an article based on the thumbs up or thumbs down system. Allowing readers to find and share content is a good method, but what may appeal to one reader may not appeal as much to another reader. Another example is Digg the most “dugg” stories appear on the front page of Digg, this type of voting system has its advantages and disadvantages. So it boils down to human input vs. machine input, does the human input give the user too much control over content?
In some cases social networking sites are generating more referral traffic than the search engine giants. Many media sources (i.e. newspapers online) have made it easy for their loyal fans to easily spread stories across the social search (and rating) landscape. Social feeds have enabled content discovery in a completely different way than past internet systems allowed for. Although the social search is somewhat unique when compared to the main search engine companies (i.e. Google, Yahoo, and Bing) use of machine-based or algorithmic functions, the social search is more so based on personal opinion (by a human). These types of submission and voting systems for social sites are ever most popular and I believe that we will see “social” search continue to grow in the future. It’s these ‘social’ types of relationships that define a lot of computer usage time today. This word-of-mouth nature that social bookmarking allows for is leading to a social revolution of content discovery and ranking.
