Social search is likely the next killer app. The tastes of my friends are far more relevant to me than the judgement of bots.
The question is, who will do it better: Google or Facebook? The search engine or the social graph?
The question is, who will do it better: Google or Facebook? The search engine or the social graph?
1) Is Blockbuster Movie any good?
Here the opinions of your friends might be more valuable to you, as valuable to you, or less valuable to you, depending on how important it is to you to have the same taste as your friends or whether you consider their movie tastes similar to your own.
2) Courtship rituals of early-modern spain
Here the opinions of your friends are almost certainly less relevant than that of a bot, unless you run in a very niche circle.
3) Directions to Skyline Chili
Here the bot is almost definitely a better choice than your friends.
Lastly, you always have to fall back to a bot because most searches are not going to have many results that friends have actively curated. So bots will continually have a place in search, and I would argue will because more important over time, as they become smarter.
+1 doesn't offer search by your friends or traditional Google search. It is augmenting traditional search with relevant data from your social graph. If You are searching for directions to Skypline Chili and your friend (or friend of a friend) has +1'd a link, it is probably the best directions to the restaurant.
It isn't search or +1. It is search+1.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
IMO the most informative result on that page is third from the bottom: a JSTOR link to an academic article published in the journal Hispania. That's probably because I spend all day reading journal articles -- as do most of my friends. A smart "social search" algorithm would integrate that signal, along with whatever the bot returns, and promote that link for me and the people with whom I associate. By the same token, the majority of searchers would probably prefer the top link, which is an about.com summary of the topic.
I am as skeptical as they come regarding the "social" fad. But it's difficult for me to see how Google's search algorithms couldn't be improved by incorporating this stuff.
Plus, I don't necessarily have all that much in common with my friends, but if Google can categorize me and say "oh, people with similar interests as you liked this", that's likely much more relevant. This isn't to say Facebook couldn't do something similar, I just feel like this is much more up Google's alley.