Yesterday, I had a sudden thought that I immediately posted to Twitter using two tweets (follow me @chrismonnier):
The brilliance of Google’s PageRank is that it uses links and such as a proxy for the trust placed in a given source. Social media scraps the ‘proxy’ part and allows people to get info directly from trusted sources (friends, people they follow, etc.).
The more I thought about it, I realized that the difference noted above can be thought of in terms of meanings (for a thorough discussion of “meanings” in the realm of products, I highly recommend Roberto Verganti’s Design Driven Innovation). Traditional search (which I’ll call robot search) has a certain set of meanings within people’s lives, while social search (i.e. seeking information using social media) has a different set of meanings.
Robot search has proven to be enormously useful and is a vital part of the online experience for pretty much everyone. And, like any product, robot search also has meaning to its users—there are emotions and attitudes associated with it. Robot search (especially Google’s traditional search) is consistent, reliable, and confident. At a higher level, these emotions and attitudes add up to a sense of trust—users trust robot search. A big part of this trust comes from the brilliant PageRank algorithm, which essentially quantifies how trustworthy the information on a given site is.
Social search represents innovation in the meaning of search. Instead of iteratively improving the robot search algorithm, social search says, “How can we deliver trust in a whole new and even more compelling way?” The result is a richer understanding of trust delivered not through an algorithm but through interpersonal relationships and interactions that leverage the credibility of trusted people. So if I’m curious about interaction design, I have come to rely upon and trust, for example, Dan Saffer (@odannyboy), as a person who thinks like me and who I can trust when he points to particular source of information pertaining to interaction design. If I’m curious about politics, Will Wilkinson (@willwilkinson)is someone I trust. For urbanism, I trust Stephen Smith’s Market Urbanism blog (@marketurbanism) I’ve never personally met any of these people, but by reading their blogs and following them on Twitter I have a rich mental model of each of their personalities, biases, and weaknesses. And as fellow humans (typos and all), it’s only natural to develop a sense of empathy for each one of them.
While I’ve come to think of Google as consistent, reliable, and confident, I don’t have nearly as rich a mental model of its personality. I also don’t have a good sense for its biases or weaknesses, and it’s hard to have empathy for such a sterile machine that always does the same thing. So social search has more substance behind the meaning that its users ultimately perceive than does robot search. As such, social search not only delivers trust much more compellingly but also delivers a richer overall experience. Social search is more than just sterile information seeking—it’s a way for users to participate in the human intellectual experience.
For example, if Dan Saffer tweets about an article and I don’t initially grok the article, the fact that Dan Saffer—someone I respect and trust—likes the article makes me think deeper about why my first impression of the article wasn’t necessarily positive. At its best, social search can enable users to engage in intellectually stimulating and challenging quests of knowledge seeking, like a good teacher challenging you to figure out how to solve a complicated physics problem.
The kicker is that in the end, this makes trust a two-way street. I trust the people in my social graph and I get a reciprocal sense of trust from my social graph, in the sense that influential members of my social graph trust their followers enough to challenge and engage their brains. This yields a perception of mutual trust, which ultimately translates into a much richer meaning for social search than for robot search.
The point is that the social search experience offers a fundamentally different set of meanings to users than does the robot search experience. Social search allows users to take advantage of their humanity and ultimately results in a richer interaction, not only between human and computer but also between human and human. Robot search is inherently less-rich and limits the interactive experience to one between human and computer.
