Joelle Nebbe's Bookmarks tagged search →  View Popular

Every Web search starts with two queries. One is X. The other one is “who
knows X the best?” Because finding X is not enough if the author of that page
does not know X himself/herself. This will immediately resonate with you if you
ever searched for medical, legal, or financial information for a serious
case.

This was called the “credibility” criteria in the old world-order which has
progressively vanished in the new age of Internet search engines. You enter X,
and get the same “popular” perspective without distinction of credibility. You
may recognize some of the sources, but are you an expert yourself about these
things?

Ironically, there is a science for this. It is the science of libraries and
librarians. That’s their job. They know what is credible, trustworthy, and
commercially-unbiased. But how is it possible that none of the search engines
today provide you a full-perspective of credibility for the given query? It is
because they made their choice earlier while building their algorithms. They
chose the popular view. Their result pages are doomed to have a mixed view
including junk content that slips in because it is somewhat popular.

A swicki is a custom social search portal on the topic of your choice. With
every search, vote and click, your swicki generates more relevant results and
turns into a valuable asset for you and your community. Take a tour to find out
more about how swickis work.





• Choose from text, multimedia or video content
  
• Customize the swicki widget look and feel
  
• Share your swicki widget with your community

they found three key elements that they believe are problematic with Search
as it stands today.

1. Clicking on the results links is too time consuming and abrasive to do in
every search.

2. Search should tell you about the important People, Places, and Things
related to your query.

3. You should be able to instantly explore the search query results on the
client-side.

One thing we have tried…is labeling — have users annotate the search results
they see and have those annotations be shared with people on their social
network or with people of like mind and interest. We did that in the form of
Google Co-Op… We’ve seen success there in things like health. There have been a
few topical areas that have had a lot of traction, but overall the annotation
model needs to evolve.

…Another classic thing to try is “other users like you,” where you build
implicit social connections between users who are like each other, much like
Amazon does with books. Examples: “Other users like you also searched for” or
“other people who did this search also did searches.” It works to give you
related queries, but again it doesn’t fundamentally change the social experience
or capture that movie or restaurant recommendation request that would be one of
the classical examples of verbal social search.