Is Microsoft Getting Social? - Potential Downsides

When it comes to community question-and-answer tools, Yahoo got there before Microsoft. Its “Yahoo Answers” is apparently exceeding the company’s expectations, but it seems a rather queer duck from the outside. Users can ask a question and get answers from other users; if they are signed in, they can also vote on the best answer given for any question. It almost has the feel of creating reality by consensus. Still, there’s something almost addicting about reading other people’s questions and answers in various categories. Yahoo encourages this behavior with a point system. This is the service Microsoft will need to beat, for openers, with its question-and-answer tool.

Social search in general, and social search leveraged for more advertising income in particular, may have certain drawbacks, as discussed in a recent SEO-related blog. If we’re assuming that people are asking questions related to e-commerce, then as the folks who answer questions get better at directing people, the ads themselves will become less relevant. So users will be less likely to look at (and click on) the ads, not more.

Also, according to the blog, social search can be considered an alternative or more advanced technological tool, and people who use those kinds of tools are usually smarter and less interested in advertising than the average person. After having read some of the questions and answers at Yahoo Answers, I’m afraid I can’t agree with that (no offense intended to either Yahoo or any particular users!). And even if I hadn’t, the interface is so easy and intuitive that I can’t imagine someone who uses a traditional search engine and an email program regularly having any kind of problem with it.

A third point raised was that many people do not wish to ask questions of large groups for fear of looking silly or dumb. Again, I would have to disagree with this point. While you can’t ask questions anonymously, it’s not your actual name that’s attached to the question you ask, it’s the nickname that you’re using in the community. For many people, that’s enough of a mask to grant all kinds of courage.

My own biggest problem with social search in general, and the way I have seen it implemented, is its basic assumption. It runs something like this: get a large enough community together, and the knowledge base will be big enough that, for any query, someone will have the correct answer to it. That’s a tremendous leap of faith. It’s one of the reasons that Wikipedia’s coverage is as lopsided as it is. I sincerely hope that users of social search, from Microsoft or Yahoo or any other search engine, will treat it as it should be treated: a complement to traditional search, and not a replacement for it.