Comments on: Social Search

By: skywalker

skywalker — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

What is the advantage of doing this "real time social search"? I am still trying to figure why I should use this service..I use delicious and it works just fine. I can see what my friends have bookmarked although it is not real time. hmm..but interesting concept though!

By: martin_edi18731

martin_edi18731 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

I tried both for several terms including our company name (because I'm intimately aware of what should be coming back. The results with the Search query were predictable, a combination of site hits and a few blogs. With 'I'm feeling Social' I got only one result even though it said there were 2000. That one result was our home page. Either I'm missing something or it has not truly indexed social media because our system, SM2 returns thousands of legitimate social media results on the same keyword. It does not do so in real time, in fact a search can initially take hours as we are pulling data into our social media warehouse constantly. Each search updates the entire data warehouse which will gradually speed up the system. Once you've pulled a search the first time the system can go back on a periodic basis and send you any new results.
Because we developed SM2 as a tool it was never designed to emulate traditional web search- however they only achieve real time by building a huge index which isn't truly real time either because not all up to date info gets indexed in real time- there's a lag.
The nice thing about being a tool is that there's a revenue model. I suspect that attempting to add contextual advertising to social search is going to backfire as a revenue model. We'll see.

By: martin_edi18731

martin_edi18731 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

I have to weigh in here since we also do something related. This engine appears to add in social functionality to what is basically a web search. Searching social media involves far more than this model embraces- you need to search microblogs, social networks, comment threads, user-generated content, etc. and it is almost imperative to get quite specific with your array of keyword phrases or you'll simply return too many irrelevant results. The results on searches I got in Me.diem were exactly the same as those I found on Google.
Doing true social media discovery brings back a very different set of results and requires a number of filters to help you understand those results: demographics, location, authority, context, etc. This is because you are not searching for information, you are sifting through conversations. That's why the term 'discovery' is different from 'search'.
It's a fascinating thing to watch unfold.

By: Robert Reich

Robert Reich — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

I am big fan of delicious and have been building my personal Folksonomy of the web for years. I probably check or search my delicious sidebar 2 to 3 times a day, but I also use a search engine 20 plus times a day.

What we are doing differently at Me.dium is leveraging the implicit actions of our community to determine which pages to index and in what order we should show them to the user. If you test the Alpha product (http://me.dium.com/search) you will see the advantage with current event type queries. I would recommend trying Bill Clinton today. The publisher driven search engines Google, Yahoo, Ask, Live and even my folksonomy tend to be historical and produce a very different result set then Me.dium's Crowd Powered Search.

Try it and let me know how it performs.

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Delicious is obviously very cool also, but it’s very different. First, search on Delicious isn’t real time based – it’s based on what people tagged and ordered by the number of tags. Next, the hotlist is about what is getting tagged right now so it has a real time component, but once again requires a tag. In both cases, the user has to do something (namely tag a URL); in Me.dium’s case there is no tagging required. So – the fundamental difference is (a) no tags required on Me.dium and (b) algorithm on Me.dium is driven off of real time behavior. There are plenty of other differences, but these two generate meaningful different types of search results.

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

It’s is an “alpha” after all… I tried “Techrigy” and you are correct – there is only one result (your home page) which comes back from the Social Search. So – the “Results 1 – 1 of about 2,000” looks like a bug. The result, however, makes sense – it appears there is nothing in their search corpus from real time browsing of folks using Me.dium’s sensors.

Based on my read of your comments, I think you are actually talking about something I refer to as “Network Search”. Look for a post on that next week.

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Martin – good comments. I’m surprised the results from a search came back the same as Google. Can you tell me the search terms you were using?

Also – can you confirm that you were clicking on the “I Feel Social” button? If you simply were clicking “Search”, you will get the same results that you’ll get on Yahoo since it’s merely using Yahoo BOSS. However, “I Feel Social” is the Me.dium Social Search algorithm.

By: Robert Reich

Robert Reich — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

First I echo Brad – good comments.

I wanted to address each of your comments and or opinions.

Item 1) This engine appears to add in social functionality to what is basically a web search.
A) We are not crawling the web looking for social content, our users do this implicitly based on their surfing patterns.

Item 2) Searching social media involves far more than this model embraces- you need to search microblogs, social networks, comment threads, user-generated content, etc. and it is almost imperative to get quite specific with your array of keyword phrases or you'll simply return too many irrelevant results.
A) I do not agree that these are required sources for an engine to be considered social. In Me.diums case our users decide what is interesting, we do not filter, except porn, the content type. If our users visit a microblog, specific pages in a social network, comment threads, or some other type of user-generated content we should be indexing and making it available.

Item 3) The results on searches I got in Me.diem were exactly the same as those I found on Google. Doing true social media discovery brings back a very different set of results and requires a number of filters to help you understand those results: demographics, location, authority, context, etc.
A) As brad says if you click i feel social you are only receiving pages that have been vetted by Me.dium users. The additional metadata: demographics, location, authority, context, ext… can be used as filters, but I do not view these as requirements for being social search engine.

By: matteofabiano

matteofabiano — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Robert,

When people talk about social search they fundamentally talk about 3 types of apps:

1. Search on a user-contributed index (e.g. delicious)

2. Search on content my social network has produced (e.g. Facebook, Friendfeed)

3. Search with collaborative filters (e.g. Amazon)

Which category does me.dium fit in? Or is it something else?

By: chase_barf55451

chase_barf55451 — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Interesting. I joined and will play around with the features. My results were different than Google, depends on your search terms I suppose and whether they are social based or genral in nature. I absolutely love to contribute to new worthwhile services. They should consider adopting an OpenID login model like Intense Debate and many other sites are migrating to.