Do humans return better search results than computers? Yes, actual intelligence beats the artificial kind. But computers are really good at aggregating what humans have created.
There’s talk about social search being the next wave. Google already uses social search. They call it PageRank, and it’s why they are number one right now. It changed the game, and aggregated our opinions about sites in a usable way.
Social search may be the past, but it is also the future, as long as computers are still involved:
- With the web opening up, human-filtered content will become more available to search engines. Check out the one result search query for an example.
- Personalization is another method to filter what humans are already creating. See Greg Linden’s recent post characterizing value of personalized search. Linden wrote the first Amazon recommendation system.
- Leveraging what my friends like might be the purest form of social search. For this to work, it’s going to take more than me sharing a single link. Sites I have liked need to help my friend without my immediate intervention. While social networks might appear best poised, it’s going to take data, so someone like del.icio.us is actually closer than Facebook, for example.
As much as some might despise game-able algorithms determining search results, that’s not going away. Even with social search, we still need the computers to do the heavy lifting.
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