Yahoo and now Google have climbed aboard the social search bandwagon. It looks like Microsoft will soon hoist itself aboard as well. Does the software giant have a hope of regaining lost search engine market share? And is social search even a good idea to begin with?
If you’ve been following Internet news in general, you’ll notice an increasing focus on community. Getting visitors to your site to network with each other is only the first step; harnessing that power by tying it to search seems like the ultimate in Web 2.0. Is it any wonder that the major search engines are looking for good ways to tap into this?
Yahoo has been working on social search for quite some time now. The company’s April Fool’s joke this year involved posting to its own search blog its intentions to just buy Web 2.0. “All of it. All of the people, the round cornered boxes, crazy business ideas, and pastel colors.” Of course, it couldn’t make that joke if there wasn’t a grain of truth to it; my vote for Yahoo’s coolest Web 2.0 purchase recently has to be for Del.icio.us, a social search engine.
Google was slower to catch on to this new trend. But anybody who has given its Google Calendar a thorough test drive will see the search engine leader has finally “got it.” The beta scheduling service offers options for sharing your calendars, with whom, and to what degree. The most open option for a calendar is to make it “public.” This status means that anybody who uses Google Calendar can find the events on that calendar when they perform the appropriate keyword search while using the service. It’s not a bad option for clubs and other social organizations who want to get the word out about their activities and maybe attract some new members.
But where has Microsoft been in all this? The software giant was originally slow to catch on to the importance of the Internet, but eventually did come back with a search engine of its own. The revamped version of its search engine, Windows Live, had an interesting beta release recently. You can check out Mike McEwan’s review of it here (http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-News/Microsoft-vs- Google-Round-2-Windows-Live-Search-Beta/).
As you’ll see from that article, the company is showing signs of moving in the direction of the kinds of collaborative features we’d expect to see in a Web 2.0-style service, but they don’t seem to quite be there yet. The ability to personalize your search with macros and manipulate how much information you see from your results is nice, but where’s the element of sharing with other Internet users? Where’s the community, in other words?
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