Connecting People to the World’s Knowledge through Social Search
I recently sat down with Gord Hotchkiss over at Search Engine Land for his column titled, ‘Just Behave’ and talked about the power of the Yahoo! Search experience, as I see it. We honed in on social search because, quite frankly, it’s quickly becoming a key factor in the overall success of a search experience. At Yahoo! we strive to connect people to their passions, their communities, and the world’s knowledge and we believe to do that we have to offer a more complete search experience that brings together the relevant information from across the web with the fresh insights and knowledge of real people from around the world.
A clear example of this is Yahoo!’s practice of integrating knowledge from the Yahoo! Answers community into search. If you look at the Yahoo! Search results, you will see a new section that features an excerpt of the best answers to questions that are relevant to your search.
But really, how does Social Search enhance search, you ask? I think the following analogy captures the essence of that synergy. There are a number of raw materials required for the creation of ‘art’. The raw horsepower of machinery has made the refinement and access to these materials increasingly easier. But, no one would argue that simply blending these materials together results in art. It takes the human hands of an artist to create beauty and meaning. You need human talent to bring those raw materials together in a holistic way to create something that no machine could ever produce.
Search has increasingly become better at refining raw information into ever more useful materials. The powerful blend of Social Search with traditional search puts this material into the hands of real people and also creates something that no machine could really ever reproduce: A connection to the world’s knowledge.
Larry Cornett
Yahoo! Search
So very true. It makes sense then to also integrate Delicious into search and tags from across the Y! network like 360, Y!Photos, Flickr…
Tags seem like they will be every bit as important as Y!Answers.
I wonder if this contrast between machines and humans in search is overstated.
Normal search engines sift through the human knowledge created and stored in web pages and hyperlinks between web pages, correct? Why is surfacing the human knowledge from the web pages in Yahoo Answers any different than surfacing the human knowledge in the rest of the Web?
Social search engines use algorithms and machines to connect people to the world’s knowledge, correct? So, it is not human hands that are surfacing Yahoo Answers in Yahoo Search, but the clever decisions of machines? How is that different than normal search?
Social bookmarking features, like Delicious and My Web 2.0, clearly are different in that users are putting in the effort to explictly share their knowledge between people in their social network.
But, your example here, of surfacing data from Yahoo Answers in Yahoo Search, does not appear something that no machine could ever produce. It seems like it is, in fact, a machine producing it.
Y! Answers just doesn’t cut it compared to some other atache catchers out there. This is the best I’ve seen is MBTickets.com.
How are other social properties from Yahoo! going to fit into this (example: MyBlogLog and Bix)?
Typical search is a static function – ask and receive. It doesn’t do a good job of understanding the motivation behind the request or the type of person making the request. As users have grown with technology so has their approach to search – it’s more human and natural. Users today expect to be able to enter a natural phrase or question and receive an equally natural response.
Likewise social data (e.g. Answers) is unique because of the motivation behind the question, the scope of the response, the method of evaluation and finally re-usability. Someone has a question, the community responds, the best answer is chosen and the entire exchange lives on to help inform other members or enhance someone’s otherwise static search query. It’s an organic process.
By leveraging this social data social search adds behavioral relevance to search results and makes search much more meaningful and less static.
How amazing it is for the search engine to be able to provide all the search queries of the searcher. Well thanks to the human intelligence who came up all these ideas and put it into reality…
It seems there are 2 conflicting ways of how the search of the future will be.
1)Social web
2)Semantic web.
Google seems to be focusing on point 2 while Yahoo is focusing on 1.
It will be interesting to see who will win.
This is so far the best feature I have seen..
yahoo social search results have not been very good lately. Was this caused by the latest algo update ?
Yahoo search results have been good lately. There was a time when one-man-band blogs got very high positioning, but now Yahoo results seem to filter these out. If you search for property bangkok, you get genuine real estate agents in Bangkok, no articles. It’s good.