smcandrew

Last week I did an internal presentation at Terralever talking about how search engines like Google and social networking sites alike were likely both attacking the idea of extending their understanding of both information and the social graph. Today I tripped over an example of Google Social Search and recollected on the presentation. In broad strokes:

Facebook and its data

Facebook’s value lies in the data it has regarding individuals and how the relate to one another. As it stands now, Facebook has incredibly deep information regarding how people connect to one another, what their individual and common interests are, and to a far lesser degree, how they connect to information on the larger Internet.

Google and its data

Google has a set of information which is in many ways the antithesis of what Facebook has. Google has spent years perfecting the task of providing users of their search engine with the most relevant possible search results based on an incredibly complex algorithm that gauges the latent value of content which heavily relies on how that content is regarded from elsewhere on the web.

Facebook, people and information

Where Facebook is headed toward they don’t need to be so concerned about understanding people-to-people connections (as they’ve got that one covered), but instead they are being more conscious about how individuals relate to information. Facebook’s goal was recently stated by Ethan Beard, Director Facebook Developer Network, in his Le Web ‘09 Keynote speech: (‘We’ refers to Facebook in this context)

“Platform started in 2007, and this platform is our future. We don’t aspire to only be a website. We aspire to be a technology people use to connect with the things they care about, wherever they are.”

Google and a more social search

Google understands that their relationship with users and information is far more personal than it was at its inception. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, says the following about the perfect search engine:

“The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.”

As social has rapidly made advances towards providing users more qualitative information through the gauging its relative importance, Google has followed suit, and one of the ways in which it has changed was unveiled in October last year. Called Google Social Search, it was a baby-step towards providing more socially-relevant content based upon what Google knew about the person searching.

A Google Social Search example

Today, I tripped across a new flavor of Social Search when showing a colleague an example from that presentation about social and search that I made last week. Here’s the example: I searched on “Facebook Connect,” a technology which allows developers to leverage some of Facebook’s potential on other web sites.

The results I got, for the most part, were what I’d come to expect. However, at the bottom of the page, there was a new section called “Results from people in your social media circle for facebook connect” (followed by the obligatory Google “BETA” designation).

The two results that are listed beneath that heading are from friends whom I’m connected through on Twitter, and each piece of information that was supplied is an individual Tweet regarding Facebook Connect.

How’d Google provide those results?

I do Google searches at least a few times a day to see if anything has changed, and this is the first time I’ve seen this type of social result. I did find an article published on the Official Google Blog that was posted last week that mentions new changes, just not this specific instance.

By clicking on the “My social circle” and “My social content” links beside the BETA results, I learned that Google gathered this information for me as I was logged in to Google with an email address for which I have also created a Google Public Profile. It was that profile provided the breadcrumbs for Google to know of my connections to Jay Baer and Justin Copeland.

How Google explains Social Search:

Google Social Search is a feature designed to help you discover relevant publicly-accessible content from your social circle, a set of online friends and contacts. The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better.

As things continue to heat up between in the search-and-social landscape it should be interesting to see what both Facebook and Google declare to be the best way to connect people with information and provide it in a way that is useful to the end-user.

Who is poised to be the best provider of information in the social age? Facebook, Google, or neither?