I think it's cool how google wants to match your searches with friends tweets, blogs, pictures, etc. That would be incredibly helpful during a time of crisis. If a friends post came up on one of your searches you could probably get in touch with them to find out more about it, a random critic might be a little bit harder to get a hold of. Also I think for the most part, your friends will give you an honest opinion unlike the people who benefit from whatever it is you are looking for. Between your friends you could probably determine those whose interests are similar to yours and those who are not. For example, not everyone is looking for the same experience when going on a tropical vacation. Some will look for peaceful serenity, others will look for the biggest party.
When it comes to disaster we know there is quite a large number of people who tweet about it right away. There might still be some trouble in organizing all of the information as it comes in, as to put at the top those that are most relevant to you.
The Google Social Search is pretty cool - I'm sure that the sophistication of the algorithm will develop rapidly and be deployed across all of Google soon. As more sites adopt OpenID (Google, SixApart, Yahoo, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, Wordpress, Verisign, Aol, etc...) the relevance of social search data has increased, and the development process has become streamlined. Google currently Geo-weights search results, the incorporation of social search will be hugely beneficial in times of crisis.
ReplyDeleteYeah, this social search is an interesting search engine. If they have the ability to search all of you contacts and their social media sites they surely have the ability to use that information during some kind of crises. Maybe they do not want to be the operators of something like that but they are creating a platform for someone else to do it.
ReplyDeleteI think this is also a good example of how we are increasingly accessible to more people’s information and anything that you put on the web is now floating for anyone to find.
The cloud is beginning and it is going to rapidly change the way we receive information. Anyone will be able to access information and they will be able to access it from anywhere. Google will find a way to do social searching. Google is the most intelligent thing on the Internet and it has a talented team working to make it the best search engine ever (I believe this at least). This would be helpful during a time of crisis when a message needs to get across as soon as possible. Hopefully they can figure out a way to do this.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Google's social search is a really cool thing to have during a crisis. I've definitely come across times when googling didn't bring up local up-to-date information because it wasn't on an official news site yet. However, I follow a lot of up-and-coming boulderites who often know things way before it makes it in the daily camera. This way when I google, I'd know. I think this is also what Bing is advertising. That your friends comments, ratings, "likes," etc come up when you google something. That's a neat thing to have. Definitely a cooler step forward in the social media. A nod to Ben's post on the peer reviewed economy for sure.
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