Sergey Brin: We’ve Touched 1 Percent Of What Social Search Can Be

Searching for things that people like you (or people you like) like. :-)

I see a lot of this on Facebook. This weekend, a friend needed a long-distance tow from Central to Southern California. Put out a request, which I came across when it popped up on my Facebook Android widget. Within an hour, she reported problem solved.

Aardvark also strikes me as an interesting approach to the problem. I signed up this summer when I first heard about it. I liked the concept, thought they struck the right tone with their website. Still, a couple things put me off of it once I started to using it, and I gave up pretty quickly.

So though I find more to gripe about with Google every day (latest outrage: Panda Express outranks Wikipedia when I search for panda!), I stick with it.

Doing a search will have the top results being pages that friends, or friends of friends have linked to, or retweeted.

In the results window you'll see what they said about it. You'll then have the opportunity to contact those people (if they've got that setting on) - and in time, you'll get new friend recommendations based on what you're searching and clicking: so social search leads to search-based matchmaking. It could also lead to interest groups, especially location-based interest groups from a bunch of people in similar social circles, thereby leading to meetups.

You could also put out requests for help, and those requests for help will be distributed to the right friends (by way of what they've been searching for lately), so they can respond.

FB can feed their timelines into Bing (or their own search engine) so Bing can go grab content in realtime as it's linked, rather than take the shotgun approach spidering. And then FB would harness that system.

So basically social search gives a better picture on an individual's interests, and how recent, or how long that interest has been to a person. This where Google really needs to catchup: they should really see themselves as a tiny startup against massive FB. They should see their users as individuals amongst a group of friends, rather than as silos with intentions. They should hire FB engineers, look to their own ranks for FB power users, maybe even find some people who Zuckerberg has pissed off to help.

'Social search' will be the next big thing unless there's anything else going on. Rest assured there will be a next big think regardless of whether or not it is of benefit to society.

Search is the space of all things. Social search is the space of the things you or your friends have interacted with in some fashion.

I came across this crowd lately - www.heystaks.com. Have only glanced at it today so can't comment much, but they are definitely promoting a social search service/enhancement to the usual engines (google, bing etc.) May be worth a look.

(Disclosure from the outset: I work at HeyStaks, the startup ref'ed by Paul)

There's a few different takes on what "social search" means, the most popular being that described by others here, where the results you see are influenced by the activities of your direct friends on FB / Tw / etc.

However, my friends can't help me when i'm looking for darkroom tips or information on how to tune a banjo, or even what hotel to stay in, except where they happen to have stayed in the city i'm going to. The thing is, when i'm looking for information, ideally i'll get someone with expert knowledge to help but I don't mind if I know the person or not, I just want to find cool pages relevant to my interests.

We've tried to take an open view of what HeyStaks is, by facilitating friends planning a trip, or work colleagues collaborating on a project, or hobbyists sharing information over the long term, all to have somewhere to create a shared resource that enables them to collaborate on their shared search topic.

The idea is, you create a "search stak" on any topic, narrow or broad, short- or long-term and invite others to join it. You can make it public so anyone can join, or private so you can control membership. As stak members search on Google, Bing or Yahoo! with our browser (Firefox, Chrome fast approacing) app or mobile (iPhone, Android on the way!) app installed, the pages they think are relevant to the stak topic can be stored anonymously and recommended to others for similar searches in the future.

I think over the coming months and years the true nature of what "social search" is will emerge more fully, for now there are multiple takes on it and it may well stay that way, but what we're shooting for is an environment where search effort on the major engines is captured for later reuse, enabling fully collaborative, anonymous social search.

Maurice Coyle VP Product Development HeyStaks - Web search. shared.