Social Search or Q&A Search?

BusinessWeek has a story today "Microsoft Gets Social" which talks about projects underway at Microsoft that incorporates social network search technology.

“Microsoft plans to unveil a question-and-answer social-search tool in the coming months, says Justin Osmer, senior product manager for MSN. The feature will let users direct questions to a specific universe, such as a group of friends, rather than to get automated lists of results from a generic search engine.”

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch points out "BusinessWeek confuses the forthcoming Q&A tool with social search. Those are two completely different types of search features/services, of which Q&A is the least important. In fact, it just reeks of another "me too" move that's not going to budge MSN Windows Live Search's usage among searchers."

I agree. Q&A Search involves asking a question of a group of users or "experts". I guess the group of users could be your social network...but I am unclear how this would work. Would your search be emailed to your social network group and wait for answers to come back? Who would be willing to wait for that? There have been several attempts at "Answers" or Q&A Search without much success.

Social Search typically means that the basic search results are filtered by the preferences or search history of your friends and social network. Jookster is a good example of this type of social search.

All of these approaches are attempts to improve relevance of search results. My experience is that search users are very impatient. They will not wait more than two seconds for results, or spend time organizing their search preferences, or enter a group of friends in a profile.

At AltaVista we had  search "word pairs" to help the user refine their search. If they entered a one word query like Jaguar, we would immediately serve up a results page for Jaguar, but also offer a line that said "Did you mean "Jaguar car", Jaguar animal", Jaguar NFL", etc. If a user entered a two word query we would offer alternative three word queries to help them further refine results.

There are lots of search companies trying to use tags, social networks, user history, voting schemes, and all sorts of things to try and improve search results. My guess is that users will get better at entering precise queries, and search engines will get better at ranking results, or offering alternative search queries. The search game is far from over.

Comments

[Yakov]

Hi Don, please see our approach to refine search results. Here is an example of searching for "Jaguar": http://www.quintura.com/quinturasearch/demo/

[SteveM]

It might interesting to note that the BW story mentioned Microsoft is rumored to be in discussions to partner with (or even acquire) Eurekster as part of this initiative. Since Eurekster is focused on advanced “community-based” search algorithms, it looks like Microsoft will at least have the capability to move past the “Q&A” segment of the project and potentially into a deeper implementation of “social search”.

While I agree that most search users are impatient, it could be argued that many users involved in social communities are not. A large percentage of these “Y” generation users spend substantial amounts of time working with their virtual spaces on sites like MySpace and Facebook, and are accustomed to spending the time it takes organizing online information to suit their preferences. Important questions related to this topic include how to extend these types of users and established social communities into traditional or pure search. If this can be done as an organic part of a member of a social communities online experience, could these large social communities (MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, etc. include communities that could number as high as 100 million users) influence the direction of Search technologies moving forward?

On May 5th, we’re (start-up PreFound.com) hosting a Roundtable discussion that covers this topic. Called ““Extending On-line Social Communities into Pure Search”, a discussion of harnessing the power of the tens of millions of members of online social communities into developing Search related content that is provided, organized and presented by the members of the community. Is it inevitable that these huge networks of online communities evolve into controlling search on significant levels?” We’d be happy to hear your thoughts on this topic, so please let me know if you’d like to sit in via phone conference and/or would like to see an attendee list. Thanks.