You are who you search for ….
Posted on February 3, 2008 by Colin
The implications of social search, and in particular Google’s approach through Open Social are dramatic. in essence it says that you are what people see and read about you, as opposed to what you actively tell them.
Social Search: Results Influenced By Friends
For example, it’s clear that people would attribute more authority to the pages that their friends have visited. So if we took Web History and allowed that data to influence rankings, such that pages that your friends have visited were now bumped up in your search ranking, that that might be a good augmentation to something like personalized search. In essence, it’s a fusion of personalized and social search. In this case, what we would do is say: This Gmail account which maps to Marissa Mayer then maps to these other friends, allow those friends to influence this ranking
To test this in a highly simplistic way, go to your own search history. Squint at the overall view of those searches - is that you? Not agreeing or disagreeing, but just suggesting this is a dramatic shift in the view of who we each are.
Technorati Tags: open+social, google
Filed under: Google
Good question! Obviously our searches and clickthroughs reveal a great deal about us as people. We recently validated a technology that proved your personal purpose and values could be mathematically applied to your search results to accurately predict whether or not you’d find a given result relevant. It’s not that you are who you search for; it’s that your searches reflect who you are.
Kaila …. now that sounds really useful to me.