Peter Hershberg of AdAge just posted one of the better write-ups I’ve seen on the merging of search and social (searchial?). The concept has been in the news and on my mind more lately since HitWise reported that, for some sites, Facebook is a bigger traffic driver than Google. Peter does a really good job of breaking down the evolution of search as it becomes a more social, friend-filtered exercise.
The idea of using real live humans to filter search results is certainly nothing new. In fact, in ancient times (mid 90s), Yahoo was little more than a web directory, organized into a hierarchy by paid search monkeys (not to be confused with Yahoo SearchMonkey). But more recently, startups including Mahalo and Scour have pursued social search methods that rank and determine relevance based on your personal social graph… i.e. what your friends say, like, recommend, etc.
Regardless of how the tools pan out, it is clear that, as Peter says, marketers will need to have “a robust presence in and understanding of social media.”
Filed under: Channels, Search, Social | Tagged: marketing, monkeys, Search, social media
