The Enterprise Social Search feed jockey

“If you’re short on time the quick review is ‘It’s awful. Worse than I was expecting - Microsoft, what are you thinking?’”

Read the full article at philbradley.typepad.com

“Let me give you an example. The Rackspace cloud division, Mosso, has a blog. If you type “mosso blog” on google, you get a link to the mosso blog and bunch of links to posts. I know for a fact that none of the links direct you to our most read post. I also know for a fact that Twitter knows what our most read post is. It was retweeted more than any other. They have the data. Google does not (or they have to look a lot harder to get it). This same information disparity exists across all sorts of potential queries. They have the opinions of millions of people on what really matters.
This data is gold. If Twitter’s model includes some tax to using the system (as some have proposed), I think they are crazy. The more info they get, the more value they create. How will they use it? Well, we will see. But, if I was Google, I would be paying attention.”

Read the full article at lewmoorman.com

“Google is indeed stepping up its efforts to mine the deep Web. Google uses the term “surfacing.” What Google is doing more of is submitting queries to HTML forms and adding the results it finds to its index. From Google’s perspective this makes sense. Their model is to build a comprehensive index. Google isn’t interested in building federated search applications. But, they’d love to index all the good content behind search forms and blend those documents in with documents and web pages it finds by crawling.”

Read the full article at federatedsearchblog.com

“It’s pretty crazy to think that this service has become as high profile (if not popular) as it has without the ability to search for users by their names. Now that it’s here there are other search functions we still find more useful, though.”

Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com

“If a company doesn’t know what is being said about them, that doesn’t stop it being said; it just means that they are not in a position to contribute to or influence that discussion. Surely it becomes more, not less necessary to be aware of and to search this content - just to keep up to date, if nothing else.”

Read the full article at www.ariadne.ac.uk

“Until now, alerts have been delivered via email only, but those days are over. Now your News, Web, Blog, Video, and Groups alerts are more easily accessible than ever.

Once you sign in to Google Alerts and create an alert, you can opt for feed delivery by clicking ‘Edit’ next to your alert on the ‘Manage Your Alerts’ page and changing your ‘Deliver to’ selection from ‘Email’ to ‘Feed’ (click on the image to see larger).”

Read the full article at googleblog.blogspot.com

Google is back with a social search experiment. This time they call it SearchWiki. A collective feature “ala” Digg to promote search results, add public comments to them, remove them, and suggest what you would like to see the next time you perform your search. The new feature lets you see others’ comments for your particular SearchWiki as well as your previous notes.

It’s not the first time Google tries this kind of approach for sorting search results. They had previous experiments where you were able to vote and suggest better results. While SearchWiki has been translated in different languages and has a polished look, Google states that it is still an experimental feature that is served only to a random selection of participants and that it may only be available for a few weeks.

“Digg” your search results

In regards of every search result, 2 new boxes let you promote the result to the top of your SearchWiki or remove the website which will then appear at the bottom of the page. If you have promoted more than one page you can then organize them in your preferred order.

Any promoted page will stay at the top each time you redo this search or any other search that brings one of your promoted pages in the top results. It is not clear how Google will user this collective rating in their algorithm or if they will use it at all.

Commented websites

Another feature that appears near search results is the public commenting of a search result or moreover of a url. Those comments are made public meaning that Google has a special page that brings you all the commented pages for a particular search with their ratings.

Google will include in your search results comments that you might have added previously. It is not clear if they will bring others’ comments in your result list. That would be a nice feature to see comments from a trusted list of friends who might have an opinion on the Web page.

Suggest better results

At the very bottom of your SearchWiki page there is a link to add a result that you would like to see the next time you do your search.

The new result will then appear at the top of the results page.

Presentation from Karen Blakeman at the ‘Internet Librarian International 2008′ covering advanced search features from search engines and other tools, along with tips and tricks.

Katherine Boehret wrote, “In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails.”

Read the full article at searchengineland.com

“Yahoo had little take-up of its social search product. I’ve never seen the company explain why. My own suspicion is that take-up was low because search is NOT a social activity. I believe people tend to search when they have an immediate desire that needs fulfilling, and taking time away from the search activity to “share” with others is a distraction. Consider the person who has a broken water pipe. They might search quickly to find a plumber. They aren’t likely thinking at that moment that they want to tag and classify the search they conducted, much less the plumber they called. They just want the pipe fixed!”

Read the full article at searchengineland.com