[SXSW Notes] Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends

Max Ventilla - head zookeeper, Aardvark

Brynn Evans — digital anthropologist. Bolt | Peters

Scott Prindle - Crispin Porter

Ash Rust — OneRiot. real time search engine. director of search relevance.

Brynn Evans

* Not thinking about search just as a question in a box

* What happens when you just have a question? How can our friends answer that question?

* Search happens over time. Interactions with friends at any point in your search task timeline

* 3 flavors:

** collective — gathering trends from a crowd

** friend-filtered — how it sounds. looking for info your friends have shared.

** collaborative — working with someone to answer a question, or asking a friend a question.

* Two main strategies:

** Ask the network — Certain people actually scared of Google — but feel comfortable asking their friends

** Embark alone — some people WANT to try alone. if they can’t find an answer, they might turn to friends.

* Need to design for both strategies

Max Ventilla

* friends can answer subjective questions, but…

** unreliable — small number of friends available to you in the moment

** hard to keep up with what your network knows about

** social cost of asking for a favor

* IM, email, mobile, twitter, web — utilizing the existing social networks for communication

* most content is still locked in peoples’ heads

* What we learned:

** Intimacy (more than authority) facilitates trust

** Social context is different than social graph, and is frequently sufficient

** Speakers want to know who they are addressing

** People do not need artificial incentives to be helpful if there’s no friction involved

** People do not like receiving random questions but they don’t actually know what’s in their profiles

Ash Rust

* realtime search -> realtime advertising -> API

Scott Prindle

* Give customers something good to talk about in social media, and they will talk.

* …and that conversation becomes content for social search, helping to drive additional traffic and conversation.

* Enable customers to find the experts within your organization

Aardvark and OneRiot — two different approaches

* Ventilla: context is important. social should make a value add if you direct that question to the right person amongst a large group of possible answers

* Rust: what’s going on, right now? not just from a single source

Is google still relevant? Will social overtake?

* 20-40% of search results can be answered socially

* Evans: will NOT overtake. different use-cases for social search. google may give you the answer, but social search is complimentary.

* Rust: user authority is important to their rank algorithms. Brynn: do you index relationships? Rust: yes, to some degree, but how far do you go?

What questions did you have to get right to solve this problem?

* Ventilla: more and more sites will open up data — too much noise. Build a great UX first — saw how the user’s wanted to get data, THEN put the backend in place to service this desire.

How do you make information relevant to people? By topic, by previous interaction with the site?

* OneRiot: you tell us what you’re interested in and we give you everything around it — different approach. Also, if no one is talking about it, you’re not going to get much back.

* Over 50% of people say “yes” to the question: “would you like the sponsored answer?” wow.

* “Thrashing” —> seeing that people are slightly modifying their same queries over and over again. Perhaps inform them that they can ask their friends?