Social media has its own language. In fact the dictionary of social media is in a constant state of revision. It can be difficult to keep up. There’s blogging, bookmarking, social networking, social web, rss feeds, web 2.0…
Recently, I just read about something that’s new to me: Social Search.
In an article at MediaPost, Berkowitz refers to Eurekster as an example of a social search site. People can pick any topic and create a Swicki about it. When they do, they provide information about the topic like keywords, websites, etc. Eurekster then creates a search widget for the topic so that a search bar can be added to any site.
For example, a healthy living website might create a healthy recipe Swicki to place on their site. Readers browsing their site could search for recipes and receive higher quality links than they would if they did a simple Google search.
The beauty of Eurekster is that once you search for something and get your search results, you can see how many people liked each result and determine whether it’s worth your time in a quick glance.
It’s strange that sites like Eurekster have limited the capabilities of such a powerful tool though. Why aren’t they making Swiki plugins for our browsers? Getting people to abandon their Google searches is hard enough, why make it harder? Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a healthy recipe Swicki on your toolbar while you’re dieting?
In what other ways could social search be improved? What’s the next step of social search?
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