Social Search: No Panacea
February 11, 2008
I wrote a chapter for the forthcoming book of essays, Collective Intelligence. Information about the volume is at the Oss.net Web site. If you don’t see a direct link to the study, check back. The book is just in its final run up to publication.
I’m thinking about my chapter “Search Panacea or Ploy: Can Collective Intelligence Improve Findability?” As we worked on the index for my contribution, we talked about the notion of social search. Wikipedia, as you might have suspected, has a substantial entry about social search. A search for the phrase “social search” on any of the Web search engines returns thousands of entries. As of February 11, 2008, here are Yahoo’s.
Few will doubt that the notion of social search — with humans providing metatags about information — is a hot trend in search.
I can’t recycle the arguments presented in my contribution to Collective Intelligence. I can, however, ask several questions about social search to which I think more research effort should be applied:
Gaming the System
In a social setting, most people will play by the rules. A small percentage of those people will find ways to “game” or manipulate the system to suit their purposes. Online social systems are subject to manipulation. Digg.com and Reddit.com have become targets of people and their scripts. The question is, “How can a user trust the information on a social system?” This is a key issue for me. Several years ago I gave a talk at a Kroll (Marsh McLennan) officer’s meeting where the audience was keenly interested in ways to determine the reputation of people and the validity of their actions in a social online system.
Most Lurk, Two Percent Contribute
My work in social search last year revealed a surprising — to me at least — piece of data. Take a social search site with 100 users. Only two people contribute on a regular basis. I think more research is needed to understand how active individuals can shape the information available. The question is, “What is the likelihood that active participants will present information that is distorted or skewed inadvertently?” The problem is that in an online space where there is no or a lax editorial policy, distortion may be “baked into” the system. Naive users can visit a site in search of objective results, and the information, by definition, is not objective.
Locked in a Search Box
Some of the social search systems offer tag clouds or a graphic display of topics. The Mahalo.com site makes it easy for a user to get a sense of the topics covered. Click on the image below, and you will readily see that Mahalo is a consumer centric system, almost an updated version of Yahoo’s original directory:
The question is, “What else is available in this system?” Most of the social search sites pose challenges to users. There’s no index to the content, and no easy way to know when the information was updated. I’ve had this issue with About.com for years. The notion of scope and currency nag at me, and the search box requires that I guess the secret combination of words before I can dig deeply into the information available.
In my contribution to Collective Intelligence, I cover a number of more complex issues. For example, Google is — at its core — a social search system. The notion of links and clicks are artifacts of human action and attention. By considering these, Google has its pulse on its users’ behavior. I think this aspect of Google’s system has be long understood, but Google’s potential in the social search space has not been viewed in some of the social buzz.
Stephen Arnold, February 11, 2008
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One Response to “Social Search: No Panacea”
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I have wondered outloud on Google Groups and elsewhere about a kind of search that would allow the option to drill down to further layers of search keywords, phrases and strategies so that the searcher can see hierarchies of past searches and their results, cached or updated. This would allow the searcher to “stand on the shoulders of giants” (from google scholar) – “giants” here being past searchers who have managed to get “further”- possibly allowing for more pinpointed searches or opening new possibilities not previously considered.
I am not sure that this is possible but if it is, the only reason I can think why it isn’t made public is because it would be good enough to be the way an inhouse proprietary Google search works.