Competition breeds our biggest and brightest ideas, an example being the battle between Google and Facebook. As of this morning, Google has stepped up its efforts to provide current and relevant search results by refining its “Social Search.” Going forward, social search results will be interspersed with standard search results. In doing so, Google is making a big assumption; your friends will like the exact same stuff you do. My feelings on this “improvement” are mixed for a few reasons.
Do My Friends Create Good Content?
In a world of “content is king,” it seems as though none of my Facebook friends agree with such a sentiment. By that, I mean that 75% of the content my friends create and/or share tends not to interest me. Of course, I am not the only one to realize this as Facebook created the “hide” feature for a reason – to hide content that the user does not find compelling. This is where Google’s new social search improvements may falter if all angles of social content have not been taken into account. Here are some theoretical scenario’s that may arise.
Scenario #1
When browsing my Facebook wall, I hide Jane Doe’s posts because they are all about Justin Bieber, one of my least favorite musicians(hypothetically speaking, of course. ha). I later decide I’d like to perform a Google search for “Grammy Award Winners.” Unless Google knows who I hide in my Facebook feed, they could feasibly show a result highlighting Jane Doe’s recent post about Justin Bieber winning a Grammy and as a result I’ve been served content that in no way interests me. Not only that but content that could have been useful to me is now on page two because Jane Doe’s Bieber article pushed it down.
Scenario #2
I have two friends on Facebook that are obsessed with Esperanza Spalding almost as much as I am. Each has just posted content to their respective walls relating to Esperanza. I only found one of them to be interesting and decided to “like” it and comment on it. I then perform a Google search for “Esperanza Spalding.” If Google decides to mix in my friend’s posts as social search results, will it rank the one I “liked” higher than the one I didn’t? To take it s step further, it might even help to have a like and/or comment count fotr such results as they denote interest in the topic by the rest of my Facebook community.
Again, these are theoretical scenarios and I’ll be researching real use-case scenarios in the coming weeks to report back to you. In the meantime, I’m interested in hearing what your thoughts are on the subject.
