Thursday, April 17, 2008

social search

Popular Mechanics has an article entitled "How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It". It explores the idea that traditional search engines are going to be replaced by search engines that use your social networks to find the information you need.

The first question that immediately sprang to my mind was "What if I have an interest not shared by my friends?"

In a similar vein, the NY Times has an article about how social networks are changing how we consume news. The article had this great quote from a college student "If the news is that important, it will find me.”

People don't just go to CNN and read every article. They read one CNN article that was linked to from a blog or a Twitter and then follow another link to another news site. This isn't that different from how news can be spread via word-of-mouth, but now instead of just hearing about an article you are able to follow a link directly to the original source.

1 comment:

Justin said...

I don't think standard IR search is going to be threatened by social search, they are different solutions to different problems. But rss and news feeds are changing the way our media operates and are likely to bring further changes. Just think of all the duplicate news stories spin differently per newspaper.