How Will Search and Social Media Converge?

I read an interesting interview recently. Steve Rubel is senior VP-director of insights at Edelman Digital discussed the convergence of search and social media. He makes a nice distinction between the two. “Search is an intent-driven medium, where users seek out what they want. Social networking is where the content finds you through the lens of friends. Those two are separate, but I think we'll see a real convergence here where search will get a lot more social and social will get a lot more searchy.”

You can now search your friend’s content. For example, with Google you can bring in the results from your social connections via the Google address book. At the same time you can go into Facebook and search your friends' content.  As a result Steve predicts that push and pull will merge. We will become more media-agnostic through an aggregator like Google News, along with a social stream, where we go in and out.

I like this prediction as the Darwin Awareness Engine (TM) can serve the same aggregation function as Google News but with more robust features. The Awareness Engine allows you to spot trends through a combination of content, including your friends’ content or their content choices.  It will be interesting to see where this goes. 

Comments

[Kimberlee Morrison]

I think the answer is that search and social media will converge in semantic search, which is on the rise. Search engines using social media to gain a better contextual understanding of what people are searching for.

[bill Ives]

Kimberlee

Thanks and I agree. Social media opens up a rich set of data for search to address. Semantic search is one great way to mine this data. Bill