Our discussion of search engines today really piqued my interest. I was curious about how information and social networks might be related and read about “social search” which is being pioneered by companies like Delver http://delver.com/, a “ semantic social graph search engine”. Delver is principally interested in improving search quality by better understanding user demographics (age, gender, etc.) and by leveraging those users’ social networks to find content that is uniquely relevant. Delver is betting that users want to be able to search for information that has been generated by their social graph (i.e. blog posts, photos, videos, etc.).

I have observed another use of the social networks for search that might be useful for Delver and other search engines. Users have started to appropriate their status messages as search boxes, leaving queries to be interpreted by the members of their network. One of my friends recently changed her status to: “making hummus… what is that last ingredient?”. I asked her how successful her search had been and she said she had received four responses in the first ten minutes after she had posted. I assumed that the respondents would have been close friends with strong ties, but my friend was quick to point out that unexpected people had responded - the most memorable was a friend of her younger sister. We learned that weak ties were especially helpful in finding jobs, and perhaps weak ties are also valuable for different kinds of queries (the answer was tahini and all four got it right).

Delver Related Links:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/delver-comes-out-of-stealth-with-a-new-twist-on-social-search/

Interestingly, Google also recently released their Social Graph API but instead of improving search, it is more focused on consolidating all of the social networks to build some kind comprehensive social graph, or “a global mapping of everybody and how they’re related” especially for the development of new socially motivated services. “It’s recognized that users don’t always want to auto-sync their social networks. People use different sites in different ways, and a “friend” on one site has a very different meaning of a “friend” on another. The goal is to just provide sites and users the raw data, and they can use it to implement whatever policies they want.”

Perhaps Google will expand its focus into leveraging the social network to improve search quality (relevance, recency, etc.) in the future. It might help them to overcome some of the challenges we spoke of today in lecture related to information retrieval, and understanding (or at least better predicting) user intent. I also wonder if the kind of hubs discussed today in lecture in the context of information networks might also apply to social networks.

Social Graph Related Links:

http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/

http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/02/social-graph-api.html

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/02/google_social_graph_api.html