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.

Here’s our slides and the summary of our talk about four different implementations of search.

With the improved quality and growing user familiarity with search engines, site search is now an integral aspect of the IA for any information-rich website, yet there is more than one kind of site search. Different types of search can evolve to meet the needs of different users in different contexts.

The audience will hear about four different search contexts and will be shown how some tailored search mechanisms have been deployed on large commercial websites:

• Careerone.com.au have conducted research and usability studies to learn about our job seekers and to find out about the unique context of job hunting.
• TrueLocal.com.au is a local business directory where information is mapped to physical locations. What are the conventions & challenges of “local search”? What do users mean by “here”? What are the differences between web and mobile implementations?
• Carsguide.com.au realises that searching for cars isn’t easy, particularly if you don’t know anything about cars. Guided search offers a way to assist users to move through the car buying process. We’ll share some insights gained from designing guided search and share the challenges of positioning search and browse.
• Increasingly search is driving traffic not just to your homepage but also to pages on lower levels of your site. To really harness this traffic it’s important to start treating these lower level pages as mini homepages. News.com.au are doing this by using search to generate contextually relevant links and hence harvest long tail traffic.

We will compare and contrast the search experiences offered by these different services and in discussing the issues and considerations behind them reveal some of the lessons learned and offer pointers for improving your own work in search.

This will be a group presentation, delivered by four members of the News Digital Media experience architecture team. Each presenter will give a brief outline of the project they worked on, including the lessons learned from an IA practitioner’s perspective.