Posts Tagged: social search

Business / Consumer Behavior / Metablogging / Organizational Dynamics / Webculture — No Comments
12
Feb 10

The Aardvark and the Algorithm

A couple of guys work for Google and then leave.  They then open a startup that is a social Q&A service.

The gist of Aardvark [vark.com] is that it looks at your social graph (a representation of your online connections with people), sees what you know (as self-reported and evident on your various profiles and content), and then submits questions for your consideration from other users.  From vark.com:

When you want trusted information — product recommendations, travel suggestions, local tips, or career advice — a real conversation with a friend (or friend-of-friend) can be much more helpful than searching the web.  Read more...

Daily Links — No Comments
23
Oct 09

Daily Links for October 22nd through October 23rd

All excerpts are quoted from the respective link(s).
 Read more...

  • Gmail Users are Young, Female; AOL Users are Older – Social media data company Rapleaf has just completed a comprehensive study involving the demographics and behavior of webmail users. In the first part of their study, they looked specifically at age and gender data and revealed some interesting findings. For example, did you know that Gmail has more female users than male? And that Hotmail is the other way around? Meanwhile, AOL users are older…but maybe not as old as you think.
Mashups / Metablogging / Web 2.0 / Webculture — No Comments
4
Apr 07

Personalized Social Search…

In thinking about social search, I have to stop and look at how I search the internet.  I often look back in my own blogs prior posts looking for something I jotted down.  I regularly use my del.icio.us network, I consider how I use digg (which I consider a user group I can identify with), or Technorati (again, although people blog on a variety of subjects, on some level, bloggers are more alike than disalike), or even looking at del.icio.us itself as a subset of "highly-effective" web users, and how the aggregate data of those groups, becomes the database I use for searching.  I know if I'm composing a MeFi post, that's usually my hunting ground of choice for quality links.  If I was searching for breaking news and current events, I'd use Digg or Technorati.  Basically, these online communities that I trust – my online social circle – functions as my frame of reference for search.

So let's say one takes the model I power my blog with, pulling in data from delicious, digg, bloglines, flickr, etc., making "my database".  If many people did that, and you had a service that allowed you to take people you know (using your email addressbooks), cross-checking them with a variety of social services, and then allowing you to build a custom database of "your stuff" and "your friends stuff" or your people with the same interests or locality.  It's reasonable that you may get more meaningful results, although you would lose out on valuable contrarian sources and eclectic sites.

In envisioning a community-driven site, users could voluntarily add their blogs, photoblogs sites, music sites, forums, etc., and create a custom search engine (and index).  How relevant would those results be?  Would they be valuable to the end-user?   So, for example, I've used the Google Co-Op to create a custom search engine which aggregates my blog, my Flickr account, my "dugg" items on Digg, the PhillyFuture aggregator, and my del.icio.us account.  You can play with it here. 

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