I read a great primer on Social Search yesterday on the Rise to the Top Blog. While Social Search is often poised as a replacement of keyword based search, we prefer to take a less cannibalistic approach and position Baynote Social Search as a compliment to traditional keyword search as proven with our recent partnership with Google Search Appliance..

The blog post correctly identifies two types of Social Search:
1. Explicit-based – Solutions where search results are powered by “simple [influencers like] shared bookmarks or tagging of content with descriptive labels.”
2. Implicit-based – A solution that is powered by the uncovering social intelligence with complex computer algorithms.

Baynote Social Search is closely aligned to implicit-based Social Search description given, as we do not utilize explicit information like bookmarking or tagging to derive our search results. And according to the post this turns out to be the differentiator that immunizes us from the pitfalls of social search mentioned:

Social Search Cons

Despite the obvious benefits social search has some glaring defects too. As said earlier social search hinges heavily on human judgment. But the web today is growing at a pace which humans simply cannot match and this means there will be a lot of content that would remain unnoticed and hidden from the user. Also the tagging method through which the search works is not the ideal way of organizing web data. There is also the risk of spam because users have the freedom to directly add results to a social search engine which can be misused. We all know the way some SEO’s behave!

However, Baynote Social Search does offer the same benefits that are mentioned by the author:

Social Search Pros

Social search engines have potential benefits deriving from the human input qualities of social search. Some of these include:

• Relatively free from link spam as there is less reliance on link structure of webpages
• More relevant search results as each result has been selected by users
• The user gets more current results
• The user gets his precise perspective reflected in the results
• The human judgment that social search uses is more accurate than computer’s ability to analyze a webpage

It was great to see Baynote standing out as the only company mentioned that is both bringing social search to websites rather than just a general web search engine and avoiding the negative pitfalls of explicit-based social search.

For any additional information on the Baynote Social Search Methodologies, check out our whitepaper “In Search for the Human Element.”