Wikia Search: Social Search Is Blooming
June 4, 2008
I haven’t done much thinking about social search. Years ago when I saw a demonstration of Eurekster, now Euereksterswicki. I thought sites suggested by users was interesting. As the Internet expanded, a small collection of recommended sites would be useful. We built Point (Top 5% of the Internet) in 1993, eventually selling the property to CMGI’s Lycos unit. Social search was a variation on Point without the human editorial staff we relied upon 15 years ago.
Wikia: User-Modifiable Results
The big news in the last 24 hours is the sprucing up of the Wikia Search system. The venture is a result of Jim Wales’ creative nature. If you have not tried the system, navigate here and fire several queries at the system. It’s much more comprehensive than the system I tested several months ago. I still like the happy cloud logo.
I ran the query “enterprise search” on the system. The result was a pointer to Northern Light. The second result was a pointer to the enterprise search entry in Wikipedia. So far so good. What sets Wikia apart is that I can use an in-browser editing function to change a hit’s title. I can also move results up and down the page. I can see how that would be useful, but I save interesting hits to a folder. I then return to these saved files and conduct more in-depth investigations. So, the system generates results that are useful to me, contains a dollop of community functionality, and sports a larger index. You can read more about the system on Webware.com, which has a useful description of the service here.
Vivisimo’s Social Search
In New York at the Enterprise Search Summit, someone asked me, “Have you seen Vivisimo’s new social search system?” My answer was, “No, I don’t know much about it.” When I returned to my office, I have a link to Vivisimo’s explanation of social search. Vivisimo announced this function in October 2007, and I think that the catchphrase hooked some people at the New York show, and You can read the announcement here.
The point that resonated with me is:
Enabling users to vote on, rate, tag, save and share content within the search interface is just the first step in creating a collaborative information-enriching environment. Velocity 6.0 allows users to add their own knowledge about information found via search directly into the search result itself in the form of free-text annotation.
In this context, social search means that I can add key words or tags to an item processed by Vivisimo. The term is added to the index. If I provide that term to a colleague, the index term can be used to retrieve the document. An interactive tagging feature is useful, but it was not the type of functionality that I use. Others may find the feature exactly what is needed to make behind-the-firewall search less frustrating.
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Social search taps into the wisdom of crowds. Some crowds are calm, even thoughtful. Others can be a management opportunity.
Baynote
Today I received an email from a colleague asking, “Did you see the social search study published by Baynote, Inc. Once again, the answer was, “No, I don’t think so.” I clicked on a link and went through a registration process (easily spoofed) to download PDF of the six-page report.
Baynote is a company specializing in “on demand recommendations and social search for Web sites.” You can explore the company’s Web site here. I didn’t read the verbiage on the Web page. I clicked in the search box and entered my favorite test query, beyond search. No joy The three hits were to information about Baynote. (The phrase beyond search sent to Clusty.com delivers a nice link to this Web log, however.)
I clicked back to the PDF report and scanned it. The main idea I garnered from the white paper is:
Baynote combines a site’s existing search engine results with community wisdom to produce a set of optimized results that is proven to yield greater conversions, longer engagement, and improved satisfaction. Thus, Social Search can be thought of as a community layer on top of the site’s existing search engine. The original search results may be re-ordered in the process, and the augmented results may include additional results that weren’t originally produced by the search engine, but proven to be valuable to your Web site visitors. Because Baynote is delivered as SAAS (software as a service), it can be live on a Web site in as little as 30 days with little or no development, installation or configuration.
If you have an existing search system, you can use Baynote as an add-on. With minimal hassle, you can rank results using the Baynote algorithms, monitor user behavior to shape search results, generate See Also references, and merge results from different collections.
I’m going to update my mental inventory about search, adding social search to list of search types that I lug around in my head.
Observations
I do have reservations about social anything. I’m 85 percent convinced that the Vivisimo and Baynote approaches have merit. But I want to end this short item with these observations:
- Social anything can be spoofed. When I visited Los Alamos National Labs, people with access to the facility fiddled with hard drives and other digital assets. If this stuff can happen at a security-conscious facility, imagine what a summer intern can do with social search in your organization.
- Users often have very good ideas about content. Other users have very bad ideas about content. When there are lots of clicks, then the likelihood of finding something useful edges up. The usefulness of Delicious and StumbleUpon are evidence of this. However, when there are comparatively few clicks, I’m inclined to exercise some extra caution. Tina in the mail room is a great person, but I’m not sure I trust her judgment on the emergency core cooling system schematics.
- The lightweight approach to tagging is not going to yield the type of information that a system like Tacit Software’s provides. If you want social, then take a look at Tacit’s Active Net system here.
- My hunch is that nearly invisible monitoring systems will yield more, higher quality insights about information. In some of my work, I’ve had access to outputs of surveillance systems. The data are often quite useful and generally bias-free. Human systems have humanity’s fingerprints on the data, which can obscure some important items.
Social search can be quite useful. Its precepts work quite well in high traffic environments. In more click sparse environments, a different type of tool is required to ferret out the important people and information.
Stephen Arnold, June 4, 2008
Comments
3 Responses to “Wikia Search: Social Search Is Blooming”
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Collaborative tagging / social search is a powerful idea to leverage the wisdom of crowds, but it yields mixed results. In particular, the resulting tags are generally sparse and inconsistent. For example, consider http://del.icio.us/tag/socialnetworking vs. http://del.icio.us/tag/socialnetworks. And this problem is even worse inside the enterprise, where there is typically a smaller user base than on the open web.
In my experience, collaborative tagging is a great starting point for aggregating the wisdom of crowds, but by itself cannot produce index terms that achieve sufficient precision and recall to be useful for retrieval or exploration. The critical next step is to leverage this knowledge across the corpus. Regina Barzilay’s group at MIT is doing interesting work in this area, as is Endeca.
Thanks for the thoughtful post. The ideal social search may require total monitoring, analysis, and autonomous integration into the search system to be useful. Partial solutions–such as analyzing a chunk of traffic from GPS enabled phones–produce some useful, but overly general data. The tighter the monitoring of the social set, the more useful the data’s granularity. Statistical projections based on samples or “what’s generally available” can be useful in certain contexts. But my experience suggests this precept: “Monitor, capture, and analyze everything.” That view scares this squawking duck, but certain countries and companies are taking baby steps in this direction.
Stephen Arnold, June 7, 2008
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