Facebook’s “Curated Search”: Can people-power produce better results than Google’s algorithm?

This is a guest blog post by Marqui's newest Marketing Consultant, Dan Biggs.

Facebook recently patented “Curated Search”  , which is expected to use algorithmic search results similar to Google or Bing, then weight those results by what users in or near your Facebook network have shown interest in. Your network’s level of interest would be tracked by the frequency of clicks associated with the search result. Considering Facebook’s bigger plans, Curated Search may provide the foundation to build a more powerful search tool, using even more of the information they collect about users to help deliver relevant search results.

Facebook’s plans for taking on Google in the search arena has been quite public and centred primarily around Facebook’s  not-so-secret weapon – “the social graph” - a mapped network of all their registered users and the relationships between them. Among the many dimensions that connect people is their interests, reflected by the types of content they share, groups they join or interests that they list in their profiles.  With the Curated Search platform, Facebook could be ready to move into this space and roll out their ambitious plan to challenge one of Google’s biggest selling points – the ability to deliver more relevant search results than their competitors. If Facebook intends to develop a platform where they can deliver search results that are weighted on the rich amount of data that they have on users, the relevancy of their results could increase with every activity that users  take on the site. For example, uploading a photo of your holiday in Italy might add “Italy” and “holiday” as topics you’re interested in, and when you use Facebook’s to search for “Italy” the results may have more of a focus on holidays in Italy rather than facts about the country itself.

In addition to Facebook gearing up to take them on at their own game, Google has been battling decreasing relevancy as a result of the proliferation of “content farms” flooding their search results, and increasingly sophisticated and aggressive SEO.

Discussion:  Facebook Killed the Google Star

One of the most exciting and fun aspects of the web and having inconceivable amounts of data at our fingertips is undoubtedly the occasional surprise discovery of new stuff, whatever it is…  A result of sometimes seemingly random connections, a miscategorized search result or random article on Wikipedia can lead to finding all sorts of interesting things.

What do you think? Is recommendation-driven search going to limit discovery of new things?  Will having search engine results weighted to what people’s friends  are into lead to Chronic Internet Groupthink?

Image from M.I.C. Gadget

Posted by Amberlie Denny at March 16, 2011 2:45 PM

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