Anticipation: The New Frontier for Social Search

The crucial strategic goal for the scalable monetization of the search business is anticipation; using data mining and algorythmic analysis to predict, with a high degree of certainty, consumer desires - on an individual basis. That is where the money is for advertisers, tech companies and those who lend to or invest in them.

Jennifer van Grove describes the latest developments in Mashable:

"The Future of Search Series is supported by SES New York Conference & Expo, the search and social marketing conference helping brands, agencies, and professionals connect, share and learn what’s next for the interactive industry.

A “social search” is one that ties a searcher’s social graph to his search queries. With social search, each searcher sees unique results that are shaped by the interests of his social network friends.

Google, not the company to often fudge with the appearance or function of its search results, turned on its version of social search more than a year ago. It has since gone on to more prominently feature social search results and blend them in with regular results.

One should not make light of these changes; they point to the company’s recognition that the average web user, who now spends more time on Facebook, may be not-so-quietly demanding a new form of search.

In fact, Facebook is more than a social network for many these days. It’s the center of our social graph, it’s where we go to find and read the day’s news, it’s how we comment on articles, and its ubiquitous “like” buttons help us refine our interest graphs and are becoming the de facto way for us to voice our approval for nearly anything on the web.

“Likes” have become so significant that they factor into Bing’s algorithm for social search results, and even have a place in Blekko’s human curated search engine. “Likes” also determine popularity: the more “likes” a piece of content or status update gets, the more that item is resurfaced inside and outside of Facebook.

The Changing Definition of (Social) Search

The rise of Facebook and its hold over our attention begs the question, should we still think of search as an explicit query-driven practice? Or, is search in the traditional sense outdated?

Are social networks (or information networks) the new search engine? Or, as Steve Jobs would argue, is the mobile app the new search engine? Or, is the question-and-answer formula of Quora the real search 2.0?

The answer is most likely all of the above, because search is being redefined by all of these factors.

Because search is changing, so too is the still maturing notion of social search, and we should certainly think about it as something much grander than socially-enhanced search results.

The average Facebook user does not say to himself, “I want to search for the most popular stories among my Facebook friends.” No. Facebook does the work for them by crafting a search experience, without search, that highlights content of social relevance.

It’s for this reason that one-off social search engines like Sharetivity are not the future — look at Sentimnt, which has closed down its consumer-facing social search product. A social search engine that requires the user to think about surfacing content from social networks is one that misses the point.

Semantic Analysis, Machine Learning and the Next Generation of Social Search

Let’s embrace the notion that social search should be effortless on the part of the user and exist within a familiar experience — mobile, social or search.

What this foretells is a future in which semantic analysis, machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence will digest our every web action and organically spit out a social search experience.

This social search future is already unfolding before our very eyes. Foursquare now taps its massive checkin database to churn out recommendations personalized by relationships and activities. My6sense prioritizes tweets, RSS feeds and Facebook updates, and it’s working to personalize the web through semantic analysis. Even Flipboard offers a fresh form of social search and helps the user find content through their social relationships.

Of course, there’s the obvious implementations of Facebook Instant Personalization: Rotten Tomatoes, Clicker and Yelp offer Facebook-personalized experiences, essentially using your social graph to return better “search” results.

Then, there’s a crop of new startups that dig through the clickstreams of friends, all of which have plans to move into content recommendations.

We’re just now scratching the surface of what’s possible when one’s expanding social graph becomes intertwined with search. But as time goes on, the social search experience will be so fluid — it will seem more like discovering than searching — we won’t even know it’s happening.