The holy grail for search engines is to return the most relevant results. Because of the nature of the English (and some other) languages, though, two or more people searching on the same word will want different results; "bass" means one thing to a fisherman and another thing to a musician. Yahoo thinks it has found a way around that -- by harnessing the power of community to deliver more relevant, personalized search results.
How many times have your friends pointed you to websites that you might never have stumbled across on your own? If your social network is anything like mine, you’ve probably lost track, and gained plenty of interesting sources of information you can use along the way. Don’t get me wrong; I’d never want to give up search engines for navigating the Internet and making some kind of sense out of the chaos. But search engines have a hard time distinguishing certain kinds of information in useful ways; that’s where a human interface can help.
Yahoo! came up with a new service, still in beta as of this writing, that it hopes will tap into social networks to improve its users’ search experiences. If you’re a regular reader of Yahoo’s search blog, you may have seen the post discussing it, dated June 28. It’s called My Web 2.0, but I like to think of it as “social search.” In effect, it lets users formally set up their contacts as “human filters” they can consult when they’re looking for something online.
My Web 2.0 takes personal search history one step further. You may have seen and even used a personal search history feature in the Ask Jeeves, Google, and Yahoo search engines. It allows you to keep track of searches you have performed before, and sites you have visited before; most of them let you turn the history “on” and “off,” search within the sites you have cached, and in general do other useful things with your results. The idea is that, over time, you build up a collection of sites in your areas of interest that, while not exactly bookmarked, serve as a smaller universe of resources which you can consult when you don’t want to be hit with the entire Internet – a universe, moreover, that may be more likely to deliver the information you need, since you have already consulted these sites on related matters.
With My Web 2.0, that universe expands to include your friends. Just as you might consult a friend who is wild about gadgets when you want to buy a cell phone that does everything, now you can consult searches that your friends have performed online if you want to find a good website for gadget reviews.
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