Social search promises better intelligence

Big players are paying attention
Jones said it's too early to know whether social search will dramatically change the way people look for information on the Internet, but it's already changing the way traditional search companies do business.

Yahoo, a distant second to Google, has entered the game largely by buying some of these startups, namely Del.icio.us, a system for discovering new sites based on shared bookmarks, and Flickr, a photo-sharing sites where users tag items with keywords to help friends and strangers alike discover photographs on any topic.

Google has started to incorporate community answers on travel and health questions into its main search engine. It has also established a program allowing users to contribute their own content, tagged with specific attributes, to turn up in search results.

"To some extent the small companies have invented it, but the big companies have been thinking about it for quite a while, too," said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Steven Marder, co-founder of Eurekster Inc., considered one of the earliest social search sites, said Yahoo's and Google's entry into social search was "validating our philosophy and methodology."

While the change in direction at the Internet search leaders proves the startups were onto something, it also is forcing them to either find a specialized niche soon or get swallowed by the much larger fish.

Marder said Eurekster, where results are weighted based on how many users click to a given site, will never be a destination site like Google or Yahoo, but he is trying to market the service for companies that want to build their own specialized search engines on private Web pages.

Likewise, Prefound is largely trying to cater to academics.

Other startup efforts include the appropriately named StumbleUpon, which three Canadians designed to cater to habitual Web surfers. Type in a topic and click "Stumble" to randomly be diverted to a site popular with other users.

"It's more of a recommendation engine than a search engine," said Garrett Camp, one of StumbleUpon's founders. "All they really want to do is discover all the best sites up there. Google is still going to remain focused on the task-oriented. StumbleUpon is much more discovery."

Such is the mantra for many of these startups that have seen Google or Yahoo upstage them on the concept of social search. They're marketing themselves as more vital than ever, hoping to pick off a few users, which might be all they need to turn a profit.

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