Search and Social? Eh, no.

Coming from the PR and social side, I'll argue that social is searchable. As in the blogs you right, the stories you Tweet, the Facebook pages you maintain, should be optimized so they can be found, by “proper” search engines as you call them. One “social” getting a lot of searches I believe is YouTube, but then it's people looking for kitten videos and crap, not always the next laptop they should buy. FWIW.

Too right, those who claim that people use Facebook as a search engine more now than 'whatever' forget the fact that if you use Facebook as a search engine then you're an idiot, because it isn't a search engine. It's a toy, that's it!

good article

I've used social media for search before now. But it's more for gauging opinions “what should I see tonight in the cinema”, and “what's one with my washing machine? it's doing this”. Things that search engines weren't particularly great at finding.

Not sure if what I'm using for is classed as “search”, but yes, discounting SEO because you have a bajillion twitter followers is ludicrous.

OMG I can't believe it!! I have a raging-egomaniac husband with a god-complex who said the same thing about the Internet being “just a fad” and it was all just a “bunch of bullshit” that would pass like everything else always does…like what, the pet rock?

He still won't admit he was wrong and to this day, doesn't like the Internet but he sure uses it – but nothing social and very rarely!!

Social isn't search, and I see no reason to think it will replace search, but it's starting to matter in search. If search engines treat a tweet from a person with a lot of followers the way they treat a link from a site with authority, then I have to question my decision not to get involved with Twitter just because it's stupid, even if I'm right that it's stupid.

The emperor has no clothes! This article is spot on. I can see how Facebook generates a lot of attention – 500M users is a hell of a lot, and like Google, once you have a huge user base, you can turn your attention to different objectives, and the sheep will follow. Unless you are in a super narrow niche (online games, ringtones, etc) conversion rate from social searches/ads is close to zero.

To be honest, I don't want social to become search. I read a post by @graywolf that really stated it for me. If I'm only reading what my friends “like” then I'm losing out on things I may disagree with. If I'm ultra liberal, I won't know that Fox News is leading the rest of the nation in ideas – If I'm ultra neo con, I won't get the full story. Since all “news” is biased, I will totally miss out on stories that I personally like to hear.

If we only hang out with people who think like us, we will ultimately miss out on the chance to learn something new.

Excellently put Barry. I search social sites for other users and that's about it. The only exception being that most anti-social of social sites – delicious.com, which remains an excellent resource.

Interesting! Granted, social is not search though social can help build brand and awareness of a product … thus people will then search more for that brand or product via traditional methods aka search engines, no?

[...] Bullshit: Search and Social? Eh, no. I don’t buy in to this social-search-coagulation. It just doesn’t compute with me. Looking at [...]

Never mind “Social is the new Search” – I'm seeing people, with straight faces, say that “you don't need a website if you're on Facebook”.

What?

That's so dumb it makes my head bleed.

I think where we're going to see search become more and more social is on the news side. We look to our Twitter feeds and to some extent our Facebook news feeds to catch news from sources we're interested in. Our social networks act as a relevancy filter for us; if we're not going directly to CNN.com or FoxNews.com or wherever we go, we go to our social networks first, and maybe from there we go onto Google News.

The other thing that could replace search is the how to. Example: I recently bought a garage door opener and discovered that if I were in the house, it worked fine, but not if I were standing in the driveway (real useful). I didn't bother with a search engine; I figured I'd get crap results. So I threw it out on Twitter, and had my problem solved in about 10 minutes.

But the major search engines aren't going to be replaced by social networks, and even if social is embedded in search, the real-time aspect is going to be mostly useless.

I am 100% agree with you, both have its own importance and they can not replace each other……Real time search results in some case are very useful if you are tracking any event or any score or any recent happening in the world….

Great point. Adsense driven splogs/content farms now pollute almost all the top positions in the search results for 'how to' queries. The keys to the jailhouse are Google's own pocket. Squashing this crap like Mahalo, eHow and About.com won't be easy, but if they can manage it, it will crush the need to turn to social for 'how to''s

I don't think social media will replace search but there is something to it when social media sites, profiles and feeds are showing up in search results. When the whale attack happened at SeaWorld, I immediately Googled “SeaWorld Orlando” and on the first page of Google, a live twitter feed came up showing all Tweets that contained “SeaWorld Orlando” and that keyword was in bold.

Realistically social media platforms will not replace the search engines, but they have already affected the way search engines work.

TV still hasn't destroyed radio and it has been many many years. Just like the TV vs radio metaphor social media will continue to affect how the major search engines work, but the major search engines don't really push the needle on social media change. This means that over the coming years we will likely see a growth of social media that outstrips the velocity of search engine growth.

I assume that Social Activities should be natural and not should have artificial makeup to make them searchable, however i know many things can be done to make them searchable as i am in same industry

Not to pimp my own post but I covered the chatter online regarding social + search here http://www.searchbrat.com/social-seo-the-evolut…

I think if we are saying will social media spots replace search engines, the answer is no. The bigger question is what impact will social have on search in terms of link building, personalisation, social metrics, etc etc. In the above blog post I have linked out to some interesting posts from the community on this subject.

I do agree with Barry, I have to laugh when social media agencies say invest everything you have in social, search is dead. I would love to see them release some stats on how social traffic behaves on their sites and what KPIs they are measuring.

It's not dumb really, it depends who is saying it (and who it's being said to). My head would bleed too if that was said to the owner of a large or growing business with a real need to reach out in 'search'.

However there are many small businesses who's target market use social networks and do fine without a website, and certainly don't need one. I'm talking about certain homebased business run by someone who just wants to 'get by' and work for themselves.

The level of exposure and marketing required comes down to the needs and aims of that particular business, where the target market most frequent and where (the desired level) of potential customers are likely to come from :)

There are over 600 million queries on the Facebook internal search engine each month, not even close to the 10 billion on Google, but enough to put it in the top 20 search properties tracked by comScore.

There's a little bit of searching going on within social media sites but the real story is obviously in the intersection of the two. People search for answers and socialize for opinions. They're two different behaviors and neither will replace the other in my opinion.

That's the context for the graphic above you've taken from my website or PPT (also used as the avatar for @toprank). Making the graphic blue instead of red is about as original as the blog post. I call Bullshit.

I used twitter during the bangkok riots recently because there was no other search facility I could find that was updating as quick as twitter to tell me which areas of the city were safe to goto..

Lee, You're free to post your own rant and send it to Dave for publishing here. And yes I stole your image, made it blue and added a red cross – red on red doesn't really work, you know. Besides blue makes the rage in my eyes stand out more.

If you are not on the internet to make money and just want to be out there for friends, facebook is all you need.

I once made the mistake of using a graphic I pulled off of Google images. Thought nothing of it for years but it turns out it came from a fairly popular site and someone noticed it and all of a sudden I got LOTS of hate mail for my stupid mistake. Now every picture or image I have made or buy for a buck at one of the photos/graphics for sale sites. I don't need the grief or to make enemies.

Barry, right on about the “eh, no.” However, I think there could be a convergence of search and social if people were less protective of online privacy. The problem is too many people worry about one site accessing your personal information from another site.

Imagine the power of a search engine that was able to tap your personal network on social sites to suggest results that you were either likely to agree or disagree with, then, with permission of course, notify your network of what you were looking for. This way, if you are trying to get a garage door opener to work from outside you not only get the possibly instant gratification of finding a useful search result, you get the 10 minute follow up from someone in the network that can help.

I admit the premise is very unnerving, but I'll bet future generations won't be as protective of their privacy as they probably should be.

Now to go patent that search/social convergence idea…

Using both can actually yield good results, IMHO.
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Interesting! Granted, social is not search though social can help build brand and awareness of a product … thus people will then search more for that brand or product via traditional methods google search engines, no?

I love hate mail. Let them bring it.

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This way, if you are trying to get a garage door opener to work from outside you not only get the possibly instant gratification of finding a useful search result, you get the 10 minute follow up from someone in the network that can help.