Comments on: Social Search Wins

By: Oracle on Twitter | Oracle

Oracle on Twitter | Oracle — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:12:25 +0000

[...] with the trending topics for right now, the day and the week. As I’ve noted in the past, social search is a big win for me on Twitter, again vetted against an extended network I [...]

By: Ervin Blaylock

Ervin Blaylock — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:02:53 +0000

I think this social networking is great a way to meet new people
and get up to the minute information and it's free all it
cost your time

Ervin

By: Traditional Enterprise Search Meets E2.0 « Word of Pie

Traditional Enterprise Search Meets E2.0 « Word of Pie — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:24:39 +0000

[...] Appliance, but can help traditional enterprise search engines. The post that inspired Bex, Social Search Wins, and its follow-up, explore how these Web 2.0 concepts can help users find things in their [...]

By: Jake

Jake — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:11:23 +0000

I'd argue it's always been the most popular way to get answers, but physical limitations have forced people to use other methods with some success. New tools have opened up the weak ties we already have, allowing us to mine them.

Your use case is very similar to one Paul had with Connect. These are solid gold for people who need use cases showing ROI. We should collect them . . .

By: Jake

Jake — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 22:05:51 +0000

Agreed. Structured data are much tougher to index. I'm not suggesting a full replacement of search engines either. They're still needed to get initial results that are then refined by social metadata.

I like your suggestion about using REST. I plan to do another part on this today, and I'll check them out before I put pen to paper

By: Jake

Jake — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:58:16 +0000

Yeah, reading over my post, I'm planning a part 2 today. I didn't get into the meat of it very much. You touched on a couple points I didn't emphasize enough, no spam and trust.

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:27:21 +0000

A practical example from 2 weeks ago.

Someone asked me (via email) if I had a contact name for the developers of Aria (Oracle's People Search Tool). After toiling through our intranet and not having any luck. I posted the question on OraTweet, and had an answer within a few minutes.

A colleague had the same experience when trying to find information on Newsletter best practice. He sent me an email, and as I didn't have the answer, I directed him to Connect. By the end of the day he had a few leads to chase up.

So from my perspective Social Search is definitely becoming more popular.

By: andrejk

andrejk — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:06:41 +0000

I agree that social can help improve search, it adds trust to data. One big problem in the enterprise is that data is hidden behind closed applications. This means that a search engine need plugins/connectors to get to the data. This is quite complex and expensive if you have a lot of different apps.
The internet is/was different in that all the data is basically out there for you to grab it, embedded in html. Unfortunattely, also on the internet we're more and more hiding data behind closed applications (ajax, flex, silverlight).
To really be able to index all data, we need an internet compatible standardized data access layer. Web Services aren't the solution, as each service has it's own interface. Another problem with Web Services is that the data isn't really crawlable, all data more or less exists in it's own little world.
I think REST can solve this problem: internet wide id's, links between data to be crawled, standardized API to query data.
More here:
* http://www.andrejkoelewijn.com/wp/2008/12/15/wa... (Want to find your data? Use REST)
* http://www.andrejkoelewijn.com/wp/2009/02/12/re... (Rest is a distributed data model)

By: bex

bex — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:30:15 +0000

that just about sums up my feelings… technology cannot replace people, enterprise search is hard, and the “semantic web” is a joke compared to tools that allow “social search.”

The enterprise may never have the data centers that Google has… but it can use identity management and data mining tricks that Google NEVER could get away with to help jump-start social search. The enterprise also doesn't have to worry about SPAM…

Of course… all is for naught if you don't also institute gatekeepers, or some kind of valve to prevent “social overload.”