Search has changed. Online consumer information retrieval has reached another inflexion point. There is a shift from pure algorithmic search to social search.

Relevance remains the #1 critical success factor. More than ever, relevance is in essence a subjective measure of perception taking into consideration the holistic search experience one user at a time. Inferring user intent remains at the core of the relevance challenge that social search addresses head front. After “on-the-page-“ and “off-the-page criteria” such as meta tags, Web connectivity and link authority, relevance is now increasingly augmented by implicit and explicit user behaviors, social networks and communities.

To paraphrase Microsoft’s Naam it’s like every human being is a neuron, and humanity as a whole is one giant brain, smarter as a connected whole. If you can increase the ability of humans to communicate with each other, you make the whole planet smarter. As articulated by Chris Sherman, Social Search is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment. Social search is people helping people find stuff. And by the way, not everybody needs to be tagging and voting for collaborative efforts to reach mass impact and benefit the rest of us.

Wikipedia is absolutely awesome. Broke into collaborative directory building, social search. What’s interesting is that it is leading folks to consensus, a bit off from “the wisdom of crowds” that averages independent, diverse contributions. Wikipedia is more an illustration of the James Surowiecki’s cascading effct. … if I understood his theories correctly. Awesome book anyways.

I would watch out for HitWise stats, though. Look into the methodology, which ISPs they are getting their data from, the distribution of their samples, how representative – or not – the sampling methodology is. It’s good data and I am not a statistician PhD. comparing to Comscore and Nielsen, some of Hitwise’s numbers are just so totally out of range that it makes it difficult to look at any HitWise reported stats with credibility.