The future of social search: keywords are replaced by relationships to find content

　　

Facebook's instant personalization feature: Rotten Tomatoes, clicker and Yelp sites provide Facebook with a personalized experience that essentially leverages the user's social map to get more "search" results. (TechWeb with map)

"Sohu It News" Beijing time March 11 News, according to foreign media reports, science and technology blog Mashable today published article "Social Search future." The article points out that the future of social search will no longer be user input "keyword" to search, but the site using semantic analysis and machine learning technology, using the user's social graph (social graph) and interest map (interest graphs) search related content, and pushed to the user. The user does not feel the presence of the search at all, which is more like discovery than search for the user.

　The article reads as follows:

Social search links the search to the social map of the user. In social search, each searcher gets a unique result, as the results are influenced by the interest of social networking friends.

Google also launched its own social search a year ago. Now, Google's search for social features is becoming more and more obvious and combined with the results of regular search.

Everyone should not despise these changes, the average time spent on Facebook by internet users is growing, and the demand for new search is looming.

In fact, Facebook is now more than just a social network. It's the center of our social atlas, and we'll look for and read the news and reviews on Facebook. The ubiquitous "Praise" button on Facebook helps us improve our interest map, and the "Praise" button actually becomes a form of recognition of anything on the Internet.

Facebook's "Praise" feature has become so important that the social search algorithms that Microsoft Bing searches for are counted as factors. "Praise" also determines the popularity: content and status updates get more "praise", the relevant content can top the front, influence will extend beyond Facebook.

　　Constant changes in search definitions

The rise of Facebook has attracted our attention, but it has led us to overlook the nature of the problem. Do we still think that search is simply caused by doubt? Or is it that traditional search is outdated?

is a social network (or an information network) a new search engine? Or is mobile apps the new search engine, as Steve Jobs says? Or is the question-and-answer form of Quora the real search 2.0?

The answer is all right, because search has been redefined by the above factors.

Because search is changing all the time, social search is constantly being perfected, and it is something more advanced than social-enhanced search results.

Ordinary Facebook users don't say to themselves: "I want to find out what's most popular with my Facebook friends right now." "No, Facebook does it through an elaborate search experience rather than relying on the search itself to recommend social-related content."

This is why one-off social search engines such as sharetivity are not the mainstream of the future. Look at Sentimnt, which has shut down its consumer-facing social search product. If a social search engine needs users to think about how to turn content from social networks, it's not looking for a big trend in the future.

　　Semantic analysis, machine learning and next generation social search

Social search should be the user can take advantage of existing familiar experience: mobile, social or search, and should be effortless.

This indicates that in the future, semantic analysis, machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence will be integrated into our daily network activities, and the social search experience will be everywhere.

The future of this social search is already unfolding before our eyes. At present, Foursquare is using its huge location to sign in to the database, according to user relations or different activities, a large number of published personalized recommendations. My6sense, RSS feeds, and Facebook updates, which are based on user preferences to organize Twitter content, are all based on semantic analysis that provides personalized Internet content. Even the social magazine application Flipboard provides a new form of social search, looking for content through the user's social relationships.

There are, of course, more obvious examples of Facebook's instant personalization (Instant personalization) Feature: Rotten Tomatoes (Rotten Tomatoes), clicker and Yelp, which provide Facebook with a personalized experience, Essentially, you get more "search" results with your social graph.

Now, some startups are working on the click stream of Social Buddies (Clickstreams), and they plan to incorporate the click Stream factor into the content recommendation.

We're just talking about the surface of the problem, which is what happens when the user's social graph expands to correlate with the search. But over time, the social search experience will be smoother, becoming more like discovery than search, and we won't even notice it's happening. (Keshan Mountain)