Full Circle Associates

I had the chance to meet Shelly last week and liked what she had to say. So I started browsing. Found this! She touches on an issue I've been noodling on a lot lately, the conversational intersections in networks.

Social Computing and Search

I have been lurking at the Search Champs meeting hosted by MSN Search here at Microsoft…generally exploring the question “what does social computing have to do with search?” The quick answer is it’s all about the social metadata: how you can use collaborative filtering (Amazon), collaborative tagging (de.lic.ious) or FOAF social filters (what are my friends looking at: Eurekster) to focus search results on the content you care about.

My thinking on the social aspects of search has evolved a bit following a few conversations I have had in the past couple of days….over whiskey sours at El Gaucho David Weinberger was asking why MSN wanted to “do” search, implicating why bother when Google already did it so well. I asked him, well, what does he like so much about Google? He said that Google did a good job conveying a sense that it valued community input in determining the ranking of search results: that as people point to each others’ content, they are implicitly voting for it, and Google ranks results accordingly.

I walked away from that conversation mulling over the value so many Internet users place on the democratic proliferation and uprising of online information…and how important it was to provide people with the sense that they were collectively self-determining the value of their online content.

Later I was telling Brady Forrest (blogging afficianado in MSN Search) how I had created a fake blog recently as a joke on a friend of mine, and I asked Brady how would I go about ensuring my fake blog would appear in Google search results. That’s when he told me about Google bombing -- how could I have never heard of Google bombing!? -- where many people would link to a site (such as a biography of George Bush) using descriptive key words (e.g. “miserable failure”), so that any searches on the key words “miserable failure” would bring up a biography of George Bush. He then broke out his trusty sidekick (we were drinking whiskey sours at the Lower Level, our favorite, local, wi-fi-enabled bar) and showed me how George Bush’s biography was the first search result under “miserable failure”, with Jimmy Carter and Michael Moore as close seconds because a whole other set of people started linking to them in a “miserable failure”, Google bombing war.

That’s much more than just implicit voting on the value of online content. That’s a higher order level of conversation between networked collections of people, a give and take of the reinterpretation of information on this large scale, collective action level. It’s entire hive-minds arguing about who’s the miserable failure….

It’s crazy to think search engines could capture that level of conversation. (And, being research minded, we tested, while sipping our whiskey sours, and yes both MSN Search and Google bring up George Bush and Jimmy Carter under “miserable failure”.)