What is Social Search? by Sundar Kadayam Founder & CEO, Zakta The Personal and Social Web Search Engine
Sundar Kadayam digests many defintions of social search and takes an historical view of social search. From this he developed a framework for placing the many different services that claim to be social.
"On the X-axis, I plot the Personal (focus is on the individual) versus Communal (focus is on the community as a whole) continuum. On the Y-axis, I plot the nature of information that users interact with, in terms of whether it is Disorganized (focus has been on mere collection of information) versus Organized (focus is on curation of digital information)."
He proposes that Zakta is personal and organized.
+ it has guides who put together resources on a topic - community contributions
+ a meta search capability in the search packs for web, news etc.
+ search results are grouped into sections - a bit like Bing
+ tools for personalizing - selecting and saving results
It's a grand idea, but for this to work well, Zakta will need a large critical mass of users. It does seem to bring together into one interface many of the new approaches to search. Google might get some ideas.
Posted by Gwen at October 30, 2009 09:54 PM