Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches
user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC), alternatively known as user-created content (UCC), emerged from the rise of web services which allow a system's User (computing), users to create Content (media), content, such as images, videos, audio, text, testi ...
such as news, videos and
images related search queries on
social media
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...
like
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
,
LinkedIn
LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented Social networking service, social network. It was launched on May 5, 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly. Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. ...
,
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
,
Instagram
Instagram is an American photo sharing, photo and Short-form content, short-form video sharing social networking service owned by Meta Platforms. It allows users to upload media that can be edited with Social media camera filter, filters, be ...
and
Flickr
Flickr ( ) is an image hosting service, image and Online video platform, video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was previously a co ...
. It is an enhanced version of
web search that combines traditional
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...
s. The idea behind social search is that instead of ranking search results purely based on semantic relevance between a query and the results, a social search system also takes into account social relationships between the results and the searcher.
The social relationships could be in various forms. For example, in
LinkedIn
LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented Social networking service, social network. It was launched on May 5, 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly. Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. ...
people search engine, the social relationships include social connections between searcher and each result, whether or not they are in the same industries, work for the same companies, belong the same social groups, and go the same schools, etc.
Social search may not be demonstrably better than algorithm-driven search. In the
algorithmic ranking model that search engines used in the past, relevance of a site is determined after analyzing the text and content on the page and link structure of the document. In contrast, search results with social search highlight content that was created or touched by other users who are in the
Social Graph
A social graph is a graph that represents social relations between entities. It is a model or representation of a social network. The social graph has been referred to as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related".
The term w ...
of the person conducting a search. It is a personalized search technology with
online community
An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members engage in computer-mediated communication primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests. For many, on ...
filtering to produce highly personalized results. Social search takes many forms, ranging from simple shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels to more sophisticated approaches that combine human intelligence with computer algorithms. Depending on the feature-set of a particular
search engine
A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
, these results may then be saved and added to community search results, further improving the relevance of results for future searches of that keyword. The principle behind social search is that human network oriented results would be more meaningful and relevant for the user, instead of
computer algorithms deciding the results for specific queries.
Research and implementations
Over the years, there have been different studies, researches and some implementations of Social Search.
In 2008, there were a few startup companies that focused on ranking search results according to one's
social graph
A social graph is a graph that represents social relations between entities. It is a model or representation of a social network. The social graph has been referred to as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related".
The term w ...
on
social networks
A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of meth ...
. Companies in the social search space include
Sproose,
Mahalo,
Jumper 2.0
ApexKB (formerly Jumper), is a discontinued free and open-source script for collaborative search engine, collaborative search and knowledge management. It is powered by a shared enterprise bookmarking engine that is a fork of KnowledgebasePublishe ...
,
Scour
Scour may refer to:
Hydrodynamic processes
* Hydrodynamic scour, the removal of sediment such as sand and silt from around an object by water flow
** Bridge scour, erosion of soil around at the base of a bridge pier or abutments via the flow ...
,
Wink
A wink is a facial expression made by briefly closing one eye. A wink is an informal mode of non-verbal communication usually signaling shared hidden knowledge or intent. However, it is ambiguous by itself and highly dependent upon additional c ...
,
Eurekster, and
Delver. Former efforts include
Wikia Search. In 2008, a story on ''
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is an American global online newspaper focusing on topics regarding high tech, high-tech and Startup company, startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
I ...
'' showed
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
potentially adding in a voting mechanism to search results similar to
Digg
Digg (stylized in lowercase as digg) is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral phenomenon, viral Internet iss ...
's methodology. This suggests growing interest in how social groups can influence and potentially enhance the ability of algorithms to find meaningful data for end users. There are also other services like Sentiment that turn search personal by searching within the users' social circles.
In 2009, a startup project called HeyStaks (''www.heystaks.com'') developed a web browser plugin "HayStaks". HeyStaks applies social search through collaboration in web search as a way that leads to better search results. The main motivation for HeyStaks to work on this idea is to provide the user with features that search engines didn't provide at that time. For instance, different searches have indicated that about 70% of the time when user search for something, a friend or a coworker have found it already. Also, studies have shown that approximately, 30% of people who use online search, search for something that they have found before. The startup believe that they help avoid these kind of issues by providing a shared and rich search experience through a list of recommendations that get generated based on search results.
In October 2009,
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
rolled out its "Social Search"; after a time in
beta
Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; or ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represe ...
, the feature was expanded to multiple languages in May 2011. Before the expansion however in 2010
Bing
Bing most often refers to:
* Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer
* Microsoft Bing, a web search engine
Bing may also refer to:
Food and drink
* Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread
* Bing (soft drink), a UK brand
* Bing cherry, a varie ...
and Google were already taking into account re-tweets and Likes when providing search results. However, after a search deal with Twitter ended without renewal, Google began to retool its Social Search. In January 2012, Google released "Search plus Your World", a further development of Social Search. The feature, which is integrated into Google's regular search as an opt-out feature, pulls references to results from
Google+
Google+ (sometimes written as Google Plus, stylized as G+ or g+) was a Social networking service, social network owned and operated by Google until it ceased operations in 2019. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challe ...
profiles. The goal was to deliver better, more relevant and personalized search results with this integration. This integration however had some problems in which Google+ still is not wildly adopted or has much usage among many users.
Later on, Google was criticized by
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
for the perceived potential impact of "Search plus Your World" upon web publishers, describing the feature's release to the public as a "bad day for the web", while Google replied that Twitter refused to allow deep search crawling by Google of Twitter's content. By
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
integrating
Google+
Google+ (sometimes written as Google Plus, stylized as G+ or g+) was a Social networking service, social network owned and operated by Google until it ceased operations in 2019. The network was launched on June 28, 2011, in an attempt to challe ...
, the company was encouraging users to switch to Google's social networking site in order to improve search results. One famous example occurred when Google showed a link to
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born May 14, 1984) is an American businessman who co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling sharehold ...
's dormant Google+ account rather than the active
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
profile.
In November 2014 these accusations started to die down because Google's Knowledge Graph started to finally show links to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites.
In December 2008, Twitter had re-introduced their people search feature. While the interface had since changed significantly, it allows you to search either full names or usernames in a straight-forward search engine.
In January 2013,
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
announced a new search engine called
Graph Search still in the beta stages. The goal was to allow users to prioritize results that were popular with their social circle over the general internet. Facebook's Graph search utilized Facebook's user generated content to target users.
Although there have been different researches and studies in social search, social media networks have not vested enough interest in working with
search engines
Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases.
By content/topic
Gene ...
.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented Social networking service, social network. It was launched on May 5, 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly. Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. ...
for example has taken steps to improve its own individual search functions in order to stray users from external search engines. Even
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
started working with Twitter in order to integrate some tweets into
Bing
Bing most often refers to:
* Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer
* Microsoft Bing, a web search engine
Bing may also refer to:
Food and drink
* Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread
* Bing (soft drink), a UK brand
* Bing cherry, a varie ...
's search results in November 2013. Yet Twitter has its own search engine which points out how much value their data has and why they would like to keep it in house. In the end though social search will never be truly comprehensive of the subjects that matter to people unless users opt to be completely public with their information.
Social discovery
Social discovery is the use of social preferences and personal information to predict what content will be desirable to the user.
Technology is used to discover new people and sometimes new experiences shopping, meeting friends or even traveling. The discovery of new people is often in real-time, enabled by
mobile apps
A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...
. However, social discovery is not limited to meeting people in real-time, it also leads to sales and revenue for companies via social media. An example of retail would be the addition of social sharing with music, through the iTunes music store. There is a social component to discovering new music Social discovery is at the basis of
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
's profitability, generating ad revenue by targeting the ads to users using the social connections to enhance the commercial appeal.
Social search engines
A social search engine in an aspect can be thought of as a search engine that provides an answer for a question from another answer by identifying a person in the answer. That can happen by retrieving a user submitted query and determining that the query is related to the question; and provides an answer, including the link to the resource, as part of search results that are responsive to the query.
Few social search engines depend only on online communities. Depending on the feature-set of a particular search engine, these results may then be saved and added to community search results, further improving the relevance of results for future searches of that keyword.
Social search engines are considered a part of Web 2.0 because they use the collective filtering of online communities to elevate particularly interesting or relevant content using tagging. These descriptive tags add to the meta data embedded in Web pages, theoretically improving the results for particular keywords over time. A user will generally see suggested tags for a particular search term, indicating tags that have previously been added.
An implementation of a social search engine is
Aardvark
Aardvarks ( ; ''Orycteropus afer'') are medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammals native to Africa. Aardvarks are the only living species of the family Orycteropodidae and the order Tubulidentata. They have a long proboscis, similar to a pi ...
. Aardvark is a social search engine that is based on the "village paradigm" which is about connecting the user who has a question with friends or friends of friends whom can answer his or her question. In Aadvark, a user ask a question in different ways that mostly involves online ways such as instant messaging, email, web input or other non-online ways such as text message or voice. The Aardvark algorithm forwards the question to someone in the asker extended social network who has the highest probability in knowing the answer to the question. Aadvark was obtained by
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
in 2010 and abandoned later in 2011.
Potential drawbacks to social search lie in its open structure, as is the case with other tagged databases. As these are trust-based networks, unintentional or malicious misuse of tags in this context can lead to imprecise search results.
There are number of social search engines that mainly based on tracking user information to order to provide related search results. Examples of this types are
Smashfuse,
SocialMention,
Topsy and Social Searcher, originally linked to Facebook. Other versions of social engines have been launched, including
Google Coop,
Eurekster,
Sproose,
Rollyo,
Anoox and Yahoo's
MyWeb2.0.
Developments
Confirmed to be in testing, a new
Facebook
Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...
app feature called
Add a Link lets users see popular articles they might want to include in their status updates and comments by entering a search query. The results appear to comprise articles that have been well-shared by other Facebook users, with the most recently published given priority over others. The option certainly makes it easier for users to add links without manually searching their News Feed or resorting to a
Google
Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
query. This new app reduce users' reliance on
Google Search
Google Search (also known simply as Google or Google.com) is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the World Wide Web, Web by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze an ...
.
Twitter
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
announced it is replacing its 'Discover' tab with
Tailored Trends. The new Tailored Trends feature, besides showing Twitter trends, will give a short description of each topic. Since trends tend to be abbreviations without context, a description will make it more clear what a trend is about. The new trends experience may also include how many Tweets have been sent and whether a topic is trending up or down.
Google may be falling behind in terms of social search, but in reality they see the potential and importance of this technology with
Web 3.0 and
web semantics. The importance of social media lies within how
Semantic search works. Semantic search understands much more, including where you are, the time of day, your past history, and many other factors including social connections, and social signals. The first step in order to achieve this will be to teach algorithms to understand the relationship between things.
However this is not possible unless social media sites decide to work with search engines, which is difficult since everyone would like to be the main toll bridge to the internet. As we continue on, and more articles are referred by social media sites, the main concern becomes what good is a search engine without the data of users.
One development that seeks to redefine search is the combination of
distributed search with social search. The goal is a basic search service whose operation is controlled and maintained by the community itself. This would largely work like
Peer to Peer networks in which users provide the data they seems appropriate. Since the data used by search engines belongs to the user they should have absolute control over it. The infrastructure required for a search engine is already available in the form of thousands of idle desktops and extensive residential broadband access.
Despite the advantages of
distributed search, it shares several same security concerns as the traditionally centralized case. The security concerns can be classified into three categories:
data privacy
Information privacy is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, contextual information norms, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. It is also known as data ...
,
data integrity
Data integrity is the maintenance of, and the assurance of, data accuracy and consistency over its entire Information Lifecycle Management, life-cycle. It is a critical aspect to the design, implementation, and usage of any system that stores, proc ...
and secure social search. Data privacy protection is defined as the way users can fully control their data and manage its accessibility. The solutions for data privacy include information substitution, attributed based
encryption
In Cryptography law, cryptography, encryption (more specifically, Code, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the inf ...
and identity based broadcast encryption. The data integrity is defined as the protection of data from unauthorized or improper modifications and deletions. The solutions for data integrity are
digital signature, hash chaining and embedded signing key. The solutions for secure social search are
blind signature,
zero knowledge proof and resource handler.
Another issue related to both distributed and centralized search is how to more accurately understand
user intent from observed multimedia data. The solutions are based on how to effectively and efficiently leverage social media and search engine. A potential method is to derive a user-image
interest graph from social media, and then re-rank image search results by integrating social relevance from the user-image interest graph and visual relevance from general search engines.
Besides above engineering explorations, a more fundamental and potential method is to develop social search systems based on the understanding of related neural mechanisms. Search problems scale from individuals to societies, however, recent trends across disciplines indicate that the formal properties of these problems share similar structures and, often, similar solutions. Moreover, internal search (e.g., memory search) shows similar characteristics to external search (e.g., spatial foraging), including shared neural mechanisms consistent with a common evolutionary origin across species. For search scenarios, organisms must detect – and climb – noisy, long-range environmental (e.g., temperature, salinity, resource) gradients. Here,
social interactions
A social relation is the fundamental unit of analysis within the social sciences, and describes any voluntary or involuntary interpersonal relationship between two or more conspecifics within and/or between groups. The group can be a language or ...
can provide substantial additional benefit by allowing individuals, simply through grouping, to average their imperfect estimates of temporal and spatial cues (the so-called ‘
wisdom-of-crowds’ effect). Due to the investment necessary to obtain personal information, however, this again sets the scene for producers (searchers) to be exploited by others.
See also
*
Social computing
*
Social navigation
*
Online community
An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members engage in computer-mediated communication primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests. For many, on ...
*
Collaborative filtering
*
Collaborative information seeking
*
Enterprise bookmarking
Enterprise bookmarking is a method for Web 2.0 users to tag, organize, store, and search Bookmark (digital), bookmarks of both web pages on the Internet and data resources stored in a distributed database or fileserver. This is done collectively an ...
*
Human search engine
*
Relevance feedback
*
Social information seeking
*
Social software
Social software, also known as social apps or social platform includes communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle capturing, storing and presenting communication, usually writt ...
References
{{Internet search
Search
Searching may refer to:
Music
* "Searchin', Searchin", a 1957 song originally performed by The Coasters
* Searching (China Black song), "Searching" (China Black song), a 1991 song by China Black
* Searchin' (CeCe Peniston song), "Searchin" (C ...
Social networks
Social media