The Socialization of Search!
Written by: Terry Van Horne | October 26, 2009
Seems Mr. Obama’s socialization of healthcare and banks has the search engines joining the fray. Thursday my Tweetdeck was lit up with the buzz of deals between Twitter and Bing and Google. Bing also signed a deal with the monstrous Facebook Social Networking mega site. These social networks will be sharing their feeds with these search behemoths’.
Not unlike Mr. Obama’s tentative foray into social medicine and banking, the major search engine, that’d be Google, the lesser Bing, who it seems has jumped in the deep end, only to find, it is actually the shallow end of the twitter pool. I’ll explain that shortly.
My first social post. How I became a Social Media Convert mentioned that I felt the search engines were lusting after real time search. Thing is I don’t think it is going to pan out the way people think. I think the data will be used as a freshness and breaking news signal i.e. a freshness and content discovery mechanism… in the end it will look more like OneRiot than Bing’s /Twitter search.
I’m sure search engines and especially Google were taken aback by how late they were on the Michael Jackson news and the Iran election. Twitter and Social Media in general were well ahead of traditional “lets check this source til the news is old” media. Google is/was fairly dependent on these sources for news.
The Social streams that these Search Engines have rented give them access to the buzz but my feeling is Google is also going to combine that with OpenSocial project to further personalize your SERP. The Gypsy has a great post and will have more as the SEO Dojo has been talking about this well before the Thursday announcements.
The strategy is simple… don’t change a thing you are doing with Social for SEO, nothing has changed but may. The Gypsy’s advice to start looking at your Friend Connect and especially your Google profile and deciding how you want to pass your social profiles will possibly be a key to the use of Social to Personalize the SERPs.
The other good part of that strategy is it will give you a strong starting point to pass the link juice around your “personal social network”. Well, likely til Google just reduces it to a trickle.
Bing is a testament to what I thought Real Time Search would be. Spamalicous, reviewing the bing twitter search some of us in the SEO Dojo found that just a few peeps needed to post simultaneously in order to dominate keywords such as SEO and others. In fact #SEO is already seeing spam/ads (guess it depends why you are there) as it is and not many people have even looked closely at Bing Twitter search yet!
Another problem they’ll find is using followers in the calculation of results. They are seeing it as a quality or influence metric which it is not. IMO, Followers is a metric for reach! Other than that to use it as a value for a search is not to really get how the networks work organically or how some spambots have been used to take advantage of auto-follow. IMO, if you are auto-following get ready cause you’re going to be at the top of the hit list for spambots looking to exploit social search.
What really surprised me is that there is not a hint of OneRiot who are partners of Microsoft (will be social search in IE ). Looking at the space of realtime and Social Search my opinion is there is WhosTalkin and OneRiot. The rest to date have been laggards by a wide margin! One Riot indexes pointers from RTs and tweets which IMO, improves the signal implicitly! When I say this I mean as the degree to which they are catching the signals from a ll Social networks and sites.
IMO, look at OneRiot closely because that’s likely what Google’s Social search will be closer to than anything else. I see them using it for content discovery which many of the new patents and changes to Google seem to be about crawling and content discovery rather than the filters and spam combat of the past.
Topics: SEO, Social Media, Twitter | View Comments
Posted on 26 October 2009 by Terry Van Horne
Terry is the Founder of SeoPros and a 15 year verteran of web development presently working out of his consulting and development firm International Website Builders Terry's interests are primarily about the Socialization of Search and what he's finding in his analysis of Social Web traffic and applications like Twitter.
Terry Van Horne has written 10 articles for Cloud Mixer
