"Social" is the buzzword these days. Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Social News-sites, etc. And so Microsoft is going the Social Way - Social MSN Search. To quote:
"The feature will let users direct questions to a specific universe, such as a group of friends, rather than to get automated lists of results from a generic search engine."
The article reports that Microsoft will tie up with Eurekster which is community powered Search Engine. Sounds a nice thing to do, especially since a generic search most certainly returns irrelevant results; also the likes of Friendster or Orkut are potential sources of lot of information that's poorly organized. Sometime back, Seth Godin illustrated this idea in his blogpost Tea. The method wasn't right but the idea is. Hand-built search engines seem to be doing real good job when it comes to searching for generic search terms and recommendations for them. Digg is a fine example for articles recommended by other readers.
There are several Community powered Search Engines - full list can be found here (under the Search 2.0 Category). Most of them enable "rating" a search result. And the relevance of a search query improves as more people use it. So what is special about this Social Search? In what way is it different from any of the Search 2.0 sites?
Consider an option of buying a camera A or B at a place C or at a place D. There are several shopping websites that give you a price list. So enter the name of the camera you wish to buy, and you shall be able see the results and product reviews by people who bought it. Picture this against posting a question: "Should I buy A or B?" to a community dedicated to Digital Photography. The answer will be personalized and answer your question directly unlike the fifty plus search results.
Another example. This time personal. Recently there was a movie released by the name "The Island" which is a dystopian story. Aldous Huxley wrote a book "Island" which is of a similar theme. I wanted to know if there was a connection. Google and Amazon didn't provide with satisfactory answers. Orkut's Aldous Huxley community did. And I didn't even have to scroll my way through several responses.
Many people turn into search engines for answers to their questions. They do not want search results for a key word. This is where I think community search will make all the difference.
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