Google's Marissa Mayer Cites Social Search As The Key To Better Search

Recently, in an interview with VentureBeat, Google's VP Marissa Mayer, talked about the untapped potential of social search for developing advanced search technology and that it holds a huge promise.

Google is well on its way to enhance it's efficacy and that the search engines' algorithms would include the search history from the users' Gmail contacts, even inputs from humans too, which could be similar to what's already being done by Mahalo, Search Wikia, Collarity, etc. "We're interested in looking at the Google user base and the connections that exist in it. We would use those social connections to influence search." she says.

There were a couple of ways she mentioned which could include social data for searches are:

• Labeling/Annotating: This strategy lets users to annotate the search results they have come across and share those annotations with other on their social networks, such as StumbleUpon. It's already been tried out by Google at Google Co-Op, however there need to be advancements made to this model.
• The "users like you" approach: This techniques entails showing the users results which other users like them have chosen to visit, it similar to the tactic that Amazon.com uses with shoppers.
• Search histories of friends and family would be used to impact the search results.

When she was quizzed about the future of search she opined that Google was constantly improving its relevance of results and that "I think one way it will be better is in understanding more about you and understanding more about your social context: Who your friends are, what you like to do, where you are. It's hard to imagine that the search engine ten years from now isn't advised by those things."

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