Search Engines move towards adding a ‘Social Data Layer’

“Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” -As the internet led the world into the social networking arena, this seemingly simple souding mission that google set for itself has become broader in scope.

When we talk about “world’s information”, the biggest and most underutilized information we have today is on the social networking sites which the search engines have still not been able to effectively capture. Microsoft is known to have discussions in this area with facebook towards a partnership which would allow it access to Facebook’s data. More specifically Microsoft intends using the Facebook “Likes” data to rank its search results. Ranking content based on people’s preferences would obviously be a more powerful way to organize information, than the traditional rankings based on number of clicks, which can easily be manipulated. This would also be a major threat for goggle, whose search statistics in US have lately experienced a hit. Plus as I see it, its mission to “organize” world’s information also suffers as bing moves towards a more relevantly organized search capability. However, by adding the social component “Google Move” Google signals that it certainly is aware of how important social data is becoming for information gathering. But as the specifics remain undisclosed, google does seem to be desperately lagging with respect to its access to this crutial social data. Another interesting article I came across was on how facebook’s acquiring friendster’s patent portfolio could indicate its interest in the search business as well.

What’s definitely clear form all this, is that we are at the brink of witnessing a convergence of two most powerful offerings of the internet – Search engines and Social networking websites. On the other hand as social data integrates with search results, companies will now need to have a more robust ‘social game plan’ in place to continue to be more “searchable” by potential customer.

Bing and Facebook talks : http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/ip-communications/articles/102187-microsoft-facebook-talks-add-like-utility-bing.htm

Facebook’s acquisition of friendster : http://www.bnet.com/blog/technology-business/google-beware-facebook-patents-aim-at-search/5195?tag=content;drawer-container