Search To Social Search
Danny Sullivan
Editor-In-Chief
Search Engine Land
http://searchengineland.com

1st Gen: “On The Page”
 Search engines “crawl” links to pages
 They make copies of pages they find and
store in a book-like “index”
 They find pages using words you
searched for
 The location and frequency of words
influences which ranks tops

1st Gen Spamming
Want to be
tops? “Stuff” a
bunch of
keywords into
your web page

1st Gen Spamming

1st Gen Spamming

1st Gen Spamming

2nd Gen: “Off The Page”
 Use factors off the page that webmasters
can’t manipulate (so easily)
 Clickthrough
 Links: “democratic nature of the web”
 AKA PageRank though PageRank is
importance of links
 Other key factor is anchor text, actual words
in the links

2nd Gen Issues
People begin
overtly
manipulating
links – thinking
about votes,
campaigning
for votes and
even buying
votes…

3rd Gen ???
 “Vertical” search
 Focus on a particular topic, such as news
 Personalized & Social Search
 Reshaping results based on…
 What you personally do or visit
 What others you know do or visit
 What people in aggregate do or visit

Google Personalized Search
Results are
reordered
based on
what’s
deemed to be
your personal
preferences.
Pages move up,
down, in or out
of top 10

Personalization Influencers
 Google Personalized Home Page content
 Google Bookmarks
 Search History (Clicks)
 Web History (Visits)…

Search & Web History

Social Search
 Eurekster experimented with friend clicks
reshaping results in 2004
 Yahoo My Web promised to let us tag and
use a network to reshape results…

Yahoo My Web

Yahoo My Web

My Web & Old Search Features

Social Search Reality
 Neither really has succeeded
 The Promise & Reality Of Mixing The Social
Graph With Search Engines
 http://searchengineland.com/070827-121805.php
 Eurekster says “swickis” much better
 Yahoo dropped many features quietly
 But what about Facebook?

Facebook & Search
 Social graph (ugh) / social network data is
potentially useful
 Watch what others are searching on
 Monitor clicks in a more “trusted”
environment
 Reshape results based on what you friends
seem to like
 But who are your friends…

Future Facebook?
http://www.dumpfolder.net/?p=193

Facebook & Search
 Do you have to filter to “true” friends?
 Do you then still need to consider what
you’ll share?
 Does Facebook instead work on aggregate
level?
 And what’s the underlying platform?
They’ll likely remain dependent on
someone else…

Facebook & Search
 Go vertical? People search?
 Plenty in the space, Spock among them…
 http://searchengineland.com/lands/people-
search.php
 Or events search
 Upcoming rival
 Others?
 Or discovery…

Search Versus Discovery
 Search is an on-demand, have particular
need to fulfill activity
 Discovery is related but less specific in
what you want
 StumbleUpon, Digg
 iGoogle related magic tabs

 Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com)
 Stories and news from me and others
 SearchCap (http://searchengineland.com/searchcap.php)
 Daily email recap of search news from SEL & across the web
 Daily SearchCast (http://dailysearchcast.com)
 Podcast where I recap the day’s search news
 Sphinn (http://sphinn.com)
 Social site for search marketers: share news stories, talk in
forums, network and view upcoming events
 SMX: Search Marketing Expo (http://searchmarketingexpo.com)
 My conference series that focuses on search marketing topics,
with shows ranging from advanced issues to local, along with
country-specific and general events