Google Social Search and What It Means

in Search Tech by Travis — February 4, 2012 at 7:12 pm | 0 comments

As the leader in search, Google is constantly updating and changing its search algorithm to make searches more relevant to the user experience. With social search, Google utilizes its social network, Google plus, to give relevant results from the searcher’s friends within Google Plus. While the idea is nothing new, it has brought on concerns from antitrust government agencies, webmasters, and users in general. Fighting to stay competitive with Google, Microsoft teamed up with Facebook to introduce its own version of the bing social search by utilizing Facebook likes a little while ago. Social search has long been thought of the holy grail of all search. If you think back to before the days of the internet, yes that was a long time ago, how did one find “a good restaurant in New York”? People would most likely ask their friends and family then find a restaurant via word of mouth. Now in the internet age, all of the major search engines are attempting to quantify those word of mouth suggestions through their respective social networks.

Take Facebook as a social search example. A person may post on their wall, “Going on a date night, anyone know of a great Thai restaurant?” That person’s friends will see the post and maybe they ate at a restaurant and comment on the post. As word spreads through Facebook, friends of friends may become interested and give their input as well. All of this takes time and one’s Facebook friends interacting with their original post. While this method of social search is extremely relevant to the original poster, it is arguably very inefficient. Perhaps you only have an hour to decide on the restaurant and no one else comments, what then? Google is attempting to neglect these inefficiencies by returning both relevant web searches as well as suggestions from friends.

Google knows and understand it faces huge competition from Facebook in social search. As Facebook users base grows to 1 billion people, the social network can use their user’s demographic information to return results as well. Both Google and Facebook’s primary revenues are derived from advertising. If Google cannot keep up with Facebook’s user base and demographic information or there was a Facebook search engine, there would most likely be a huge shift of advertising dollars in Facebook’s favor.

Further, many people may wonder what is relevant when it comes to social search suggestions from friends. Take any subject that has diverse opinions such as religion, politics, and sports. A quick Google search for “Barack Obama stance on abortion” may return links and opinion from friends who are pro-Obama but the searcher is looking for opposing view points and arguments. While it could be argued the search was not specific enough, how does Google know who’s opinion the searcher wants to hear from. Granted Google’s social search is fairly new, some of these kinks are expected to be worked out over time.

Lastly, Google will continue to face antitrust concerns as social search grows. Recently, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt, was sent to Washington to testify on the issue. While all the comments made by Schmidt reveal that Google does not favor its own results for that of its competitors, it does bring up some conflicts of interest. Searches such as Flights and online videos are perfect examples. Do a search for “flights to Las Vegas” and at the top of the page is Google Flights. Or do a search for “funny cat videos” and the top spots are occupied by YouTube. It is common knowledge that the top 3 Google search positions are the prized spots when it comes to user click through rate (CTR) and companies such as Twitter, Orbitz, and Yelp are all fighting these concerns.

While there are valid antitrust arguments for both sides of Google plus social search, much needs to be played out. Will Twitter ever allow Google to search through tweets? Will Facebook make a search engine? Will Facebook allow Google to scan through user pages? Many of these questions are at the forefront and will be for some time until a true leader in social search emerges. Below is Google’s YouTube Channel on some of the highlights of Google plus social search functionality.