Social search promises better intelligence

"There's room for lots and lots of players in the search race," said Chris Sherman, executive editor of Search Engine Watch. "We've got the major players out there, but as people get better at learning how to navigate the Internet, they're not going to necessarily be looking for an answer from these titans anymore. They're going to be looking for more specialized or personalized information."

Early search engines largely looked at keywords embedded in Web pages, but site owners could contaminate results by tagging their sites with as many words as they could conceive.

Google then came along with page ranking, essentially allowing the community — through Web site owners — to vote on the relevance of a site. The more other sites link to it, the more it is deemed worthy. But site owners, particularly those with big budgets, wind up with the greatest influence in the results.

Let the community decide
Social search attempts to let the entire community of users decide. In theory, the best ideas win out in the online marketplace and are less open to manipulation.

The approach is not limited to search. Cloudmark Inc. uses its base of users to judge what is spam and what isn't. News aggregation sites like Digg Inc.'s digg.com and Time Warner Inc.'s Netscape.com ask visitors to recommend and vote on items to go on top.

Among the larger search companies, Google recently launched Google Co-op, an information-sharing feature that marks its first major foray into social search.

Although the site isn't fully operational, Google users can see some of the results when they search the main engine for information about health issues or travel. The results appear as special links at the top.

Shashi Seth, product manager for Google Co-op, said there will always be a role for traditional search algorithms, and he doesn't see specialization ever taking away much business from the major companies.

"They're all very niche plays in the area of search," Seth said. "We still believe people will find core search fulfilling the bulk of their needs."

But Eckart Walther, vice president of product management for Yahoo, said that although traditional search technology can be refined, it will likely remain best for fact-based searches. Social search, he said, provides the promise of answers to more subjective questions.

Yahoo's MyWeb ranks Web sites, such as favorite hotels, based largely on how many people choose to bookmark them. Del.icio.us does a similar job, but users rather than software determine what keywords should correspond with which sites.

And Yahoo Answers allows people to write specific questions that other users or field experts then answer. Microsoft Corp. is working on a similar program, and Google has one in which it charges a fee.

"If you asked me what the best hotel in San Francisco is, we're different people, have different friends and different opinions," Walther said. "Search engines are terrible at answering these kinds of questions."

Mansfield acknowledges that Prefound and others like it will only get a tiny fraction of the pie in the search business, but that could be enough to turn a profit. After all, they know what they're up against.

"The board of Google could publish their laundry list and get into The New York Times," Mansfield said. "That's quite a hard thing to compete with."

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