Posted by SEO'd in 
I am sure you have already heard of the idea of searching socially. In essence, companies such as Scour allow you to search for what you are looking for, but on the SERPs you get a chance to vote for the results. It’s a very good idea on the surface. In essence, by being part of the community and voting on the provided results, you can help others find what they are looking for faster. But here are the major issues that I see with the current platform:
- Gaming Web 2.0 service is a serious business: Believe it or not people make a living out of gaming Web 2.0 services such as Digg. So it would not be a surprise to me if they did the same to these so called “social” search engines. Sites such as Digg change their algorithms everyday to fight spammers, but there are just too many people trying to spam others.
- Social concept has flaws: Not everyone thinks alike when searching for even the most specific terms. Let’s say I am searching for Chase Credit Cards. I could be thinking about finding a selection of chase credit cards to apply for or trying to find out the latest news about chase products. So a site that has received 30 thumbs up for that keyword could be extremely useful to one person and somewhat useless to another.
- N dimension-based systems work better than N-1 dimension based systems: The system that takes into account only two factors for ranking search results pages is inferior to a system that takes in account 4 factors. Now you may say that voting could add a whole other dimension to search, and make it more effective. While true, the current systems are not perfect, and a binary vote for a results page cannot truly indicate the usefulness of a listing. So in essence, you add more unpredictability to your search pages by taking into account people’s vote.
The social search is exciting and everybody wants to jump on the social bandwagon these days. But in the end, social search can not stand on its own, which leads us to a hybrid social semantic search engine. But we are supposed to get there evenutally…
People aren’t always thinking the same thing when searching, but overall everyone is looking to find similar information. For those people looking for something a little different, there are search engines such as Me.dium social search that utilizes click streams and past searches to show information that is relevant right now. This may be a search engine that you should check out if you find flaws with the voting system that companies, such as Google, are proposing. The voting system seems a little static where Me.dium’s search engine is more of a living organism. An always evolving and dynamic search that takes into account where people are really spending their time when connected.