With del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon & other forms of social media exploding in popularity, it was only a matter of time before the search engines joined the party. So it’s not surprising to hear Yahoo announce that del.icio.us results will soon be incorporated into their search results. But can social media really improve search engine accuracy…? Not just yet…
Social media is the online equivalent of Australian Idol. It is a popularity contest. Digg allows users to vote on their favourite articles on the web. StumbleUpon & del.icio.us allow users to vote on their favourite web sites. In both cases the article/site with the most votes reaps the rewards – aka massive exposure and traffic via their front page. Human participation is the key to social media. And it is the integration of human authority to the search engine algorithms that has a lot of people excited. Finally… a way to incorporate human feedback & behaviour into the search engine results.
Tech Crunch has a screen shot of how Yahoo intends to use the del.icio.us results. The benefit is fairly obvious. The search engine produces the results, and the del.icio.us data can be used to assess the ‘human credibility’ of each page (the more votes the better). The premise is good, but it’s not exactly a new one. In fact, it is essentially just PageRank rebranded. At a very basic level, the premise of PageRank was that each inbound link to a particular site was perceived as a vote of confidence. Indeed, links were the primitive form of social media and social voting.
The key issue at the moment is that the del.icio.us voting system is wide open to abuse. Unlike Digg and Stumble Upon it does not have a procedure to vote/bury spam. So while the integration of del.icio.us votes would initially provide an improvement to search results, it would not be long before black hat SEO’s begun the mass bookmark process (if they haven’t already…). Even if the number of del.icio.us votes did not directly impact the order of Yahoo’s rankings, there would still be a perceived benefit in accumulating the most votes in a particular industry. It wouldn’t be long before the del.icio.us data lost its credibility.
So while Yahoo’s initiative is a step in the right direction, it won’t solve the search engine accuracy issues overnight. Until a downward voting system is introduced for del.icio.us it will be open to abuse by black hat spammers (presuming people still care about optimising for Yahoo). Ebay may be the big winner out of all of this. As the owner of StumbleUpon, which maintains a more credible voting system, they may well own the Internet’s most valuable social data. Which means they may find themselves in the centre of a bidding war between Google and Yahoo… Ching Ching…$$
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ll argue that it will indeed transform search, though not right now as you’ve noted. Social media voting will ultimately be incorporate into search as word of mouth references, where results are reorganized according to the ratings of your specified friends. I wrote more extensively about it here (http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/the-future-of-search-integrating-word-of-mouth-into-search.html).
Thanks for the feedback Jeff. Your article is a great read. Integrating the ratings/preferences from your friendship network into the search engine algorithms is an excellent concept. You should give Google a call…