Google rolls out Social Search globally | Hacker News Reader

Google rolls out Social Search globally

thenextweb.com

23 pointsajhai7 comments

The value of the social search is not the result itself. It's that you have someone you know to consult on your searched subject.

For example, I will probably see my friend's opinion in a social search result. I might actually not like what he said or suggested, which he does not know that I don't like it. However, I do know I can ask him about the subject to find out his experiences or maybe get his second opinion.

That becomes powerful because it might cut the time for you to find the information you want. It's also more likely to save us from getting nowhere to find things we want.

So, relationships do help us find things quickly. And for those friends who give me wrong opinions will definitely lose my trust.

I'm sure they've realized the real benefit here is that people will search Google, rather than typing in a domain, which leads to incremental traffic/searches/ad impressions.

What if I don't trust my friends, can I turn this off? I mean not that I don't like them or anything but I trust google's algorithms more than most people I know :p

The idea of using social signals in search is strong and I've been looking with increasing interest at Blekko recently. Yet it seems pathological that your search quality can be dependent on the quality of your social graph.

I know there are a lot of fake accounts on Facebook in our current FarmVille era (many actually named "Farm Ville") so that people can maintain a separate identity to play games. Is it going to come to this? That we're going to have to join interest groups or even create a new identity to make our searches not be full of worthless stuff?

FWIW, blekko lets you disable use of Facebook likes data. Opt-outs are good.

I don't really look at likes data as improving the quality of my search. I think of it as asking my social graph what their opinion is. I expect that to tell me what's popular, not what's best.

That's a good perspective, thanks. It's looking really promising.

I still wonder how I can inform a social search that I'm "me at work" -- i.e. I'm more interested in what's popular with Hacker News users, not the people I jibber-jabber with on Facebook. I'm constantly searching YC comments for any technical subject.

Still looking for the opt-out. So much for Google's pledge that I own my data and can opt-out any time I want.

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