Business Week Online has rated social software, and in particular that owned by Yahoo, as one of eight tech trends for 2006.
The article raises some interesting points about whether social search can be used to ‘fill in the gaps’ created by traditional search methods, e.g. complex algorithms based around link structure. It has been argued that social search allows users to define the communities from which the search results come from, i.e. reviews of restaurants from their own area, people in similar occupations, studying similar things etc. rather than looking at results from the whole internet.
There are of course critics to this approach, and doubts about it’s usefulness, with the CEO of Vivisimo commenting that ‘the best description of the document is the document itself’, which as a librarian, I feel that I must agree with to a certain extent, for example, in order to allow for completeness of description and results returned, consistency, and describing relationships between similar documents. There is much similar debate occurring surrounding the usefulness of ‘folksonomies’, which you may or may not have already heard of (I will return to this later).
Google, it is reported, has not committed itself to creating social communities to the same extent as Yahoo, and has instead decided to focus upon personalisation, i.e. ‘using its mammoth horse-power to sort through data and better discern what users are thinking’ as the article reports.
