Social Search News & Articles

We know that you’ve been waiting with bated breath for Microsoft’s social network to come out of accidental beta. Your time is now.

The team behind Bit.ly, a popular link shortener, has been diligently working on turning its giant collection of link data into valuable offerings. Yesterday, it announced the beta launch of two of them: a search platform and reputation monitoring service specifically for "viral" content.

We all know that optimizing content is often the key to unlocking your company’s potential. Good content can make it easy to sell widgets and improve the customer experience as well as make it easier for others to find your content. When it comes to SEO, content is the king. But when it comes to user-generated content, how does it influence SEO and what can you do to leverage it even further?

Microsoft's alliance with Facebook seems to have one endgame: Beat Google. The latest effort, announced late yesterday, ties Bing search results to the Facebook social graph.

Google took this week as an opportunity to beef up its social search, show up Apple on the digital subscription front, and release yet another version of Chrome. 

Internet users are relying more and more on location based services and peer recommendations than general search results. Accordingly, Google has updated their social search to feature three new levels of integration, including Twitter, Quora and Flickr. 

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. That is, the GOOG share price fell 13 percent this year. Investors and analysts have since been skeptical, afraid that Google wouldn't find the right combination for a revenue stream outside of advertising. But then, after trading hours on Thursday, Android came in with a Q3 swan song and boosted the company's reported profit into a much friendlier bracket. 

In a move that could potentially mean trouble for Google, Facebook has granted Bing with access to information from its 500+ million user profiles. Adding a social layer to Microsoft's engine marks both sizable expansion for the two giants as well as profound change to the way we search. 

By now it’s likely that you’ve either heard about or noticed the Facebook results showing up in Google, and, as the first time the search giant has indexed content from the most popular social network evAR, we think it’s kind of a big deal.  

Yesterday we reported that Facebook was taking a tiny slice of Google’s pie by adding a webmail feature. Today, it looks like Big G is taking that slice back by adding status updates to Gmail.

Google has challenged popular networks like Facebook and further blurred the line between social networking and search by graduating their Social Search tool to beta for all Google users.  

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here’s the week’s highlights, in scan-friendly format.

This week:

- MySpace is Three Times Bigger Than Facebook says Hitwise
- Social Search — not as irrelevant as you think
- iPhone vs. Android: SDK Shootout
- Grab a Bucket! The ‘Ad-Network Bubble’ is Bursting!!
- Digg to go Multi-lingual and Local
- Muxtape Reborn as Embeddable Indie Showcase

Their tagline says it all: “Be Social when you surf the web”. Me.dium, the social browsing software company, has jumped at the chance to develop a custom search engine based on Yahoo Search BOSS. They call it “Social Search” and claim it’s the first crowd-powered search engine to hit the internet.

If you are a big believer in the benefits of social search, then there’s a conference you need to attend — The Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, March 17-20, 2008.