Marissa Mayer of Google says:
Social search happens every day. When you ask a friend “what movies are good to go see?” or “where should we go to dinner?”, you are doing a verbal social search. You’re trying to leverage that social connection to try and get a piece of information that would be better than what you’d come up with on your own....
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
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Comments (1)
For example, it’s clear that people would attribute more authority to the pages that their friends have visited.
But, but, but ... what about my friends who have bad taste? I don't want to go to movies or restaurants with some of them because what I find interesting they don't "get," and vice versa. I may want my friend's ranking of quality teevee shows but I don't want his ranking of local restaurants.
If you know that you always disagree with Roger Ebert, then you know that the movie he likes is not for you. Disagreement serves its purpose as much as going along with the wisdom of your in-crowd.