There were some quite interesting suggestions made a few weeks ago by Chris Crum in his article What Facebook “Likes” Mean for Search & Reputation that Facebook with its recent implementation of the Social Graph, “Likes” and “Recommends” has the potential to become more of a recommendation engine than Google.

At a simple level, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” sushi restaurants in New York and those liked by my social network it can show me that information in search results. That hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social and more of a “recommendations engine” than Google at this point.

Google of course has been playing with social search in Labs but it’s more about displaying results that are relevant from your network.

Coincidently I also recently listened Brynn Evan’s and Will Evan’s Designing for sociality (Will’s also presenting later this year at UX Australia on Designing for enterprise social search). They make some great points about how search investigations in real life in terms of sense making are so often social. i.e. turning around to friends and colleagues to ask them if they know where you can find something, or have you come across this or that? These social connections are so immediate and valuable and are of course happening all the time in social networks like twitter and facebook.

Quite a deep analysis of these issues have been discussed in this paper: Morris, M.R., Teevan, J., and Panovich, K. What Do People Ask Their Social Networks, and Why? A Survey Study of Status Message Q&A Behavior. Proceedings of CHI 2010, in press. The researchers…

…conducted a survey of 624 people, asking them to share the questions they have asked and answered of their online social networks. We present detailed data on the frequency of this type of question asking, the types of questions asked, and respondents‟ motivations for asking their social networks rather than using more traditional search tools like Web search engines.

I think some of the really important findings they present are in relation to motivations for asking and issues such as “Trust” and privacy. i.e. What types of questions would I feel comfortable asking via a social network vs. private search tool usage. The following table presents results ranked in order of motivation.

Finally, I was surprised that among the excellent breakdown Stijn Debrouwere provides on Findability and Exploration: the future of search he omits the potential for “sociality of search as all of the above recently writings have discussed.