It would be great to see how the development of real-time and traditional search will merge in the future.

Karl

I have downloaded a pdf file from a DoItYourself blog, that was on the first page of Google SERPS, so I trust this site. Why do I trust this site? Because it was on the first page of a Google search.

Now if I have any grey hairs, I would do this next step before attempting to erect the house. I would find a forum, a blog, or chatroom, and search for any experiential knowledge of building a tree house. Why not ask my own cybersocial group? Because I want a network of DIY minded people, not my buddy Jim who is “Hating rush hour traffic, Arrgggh!”

It is fair to assume however that if my cybersocial group is large enough, that I am likely to find at least one person with a working knowledge of treehouses. But why waist that time waiting for a response, when that personalized knowledge has already been archived?

So how do we find it? Well this is what I just did in the past five minutes.

I searched for ‘diy forum’.

Copied the second forum in the results which was http://forum.doityourself.com

Did a new search for
‘site:http://forum.doityourself.com treehouse’

It returned 60 pages of wonderful, interactive, experiential knowledge. And this was only 1 site using only 1 term. You could also search ‘diy chatrom’ or ‘contruction forum’ or try any of the other 9 sites that came back from ‘diy forum’.

But I think most people do not know how to do this. So the answer would be some type of SE that solely searches through forums, chatrooms, etc. Either that or make ‘Internet Search’ as fundamental as Algebra.

I think the experiences will be less than satisfying. Consumer-ready real-time social media search will be much more complicated than simply showing people who said what in the last five minutes.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1357054.1357223

In relation to Brynn’s point about strangers, clearly there is a need for more research on credibility and trust of unknown sources. For example, some might actually trust newspapers over blogs. We’ve tried to get at some of this using the concept of ‘signals’.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1518701.1518713

These publications are available from my website as well http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/pages/sadat.index.html

Social Media: The Next Great Gateway for Content Discovery?

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/social-media-the-next-great-gateway-for-content-discovery/

Yes, there will always be obscure searches where no one in your social network will know. “I heard of this “kuksa” cup from Lapland. Where can I buy one?”

But trust can be established even among strangers. I might actually trust a random blog over a national newspaper depending on the topic. Blogs have character and identities (of the real people behind them) — this I often trust more than a newspaper (or professional journalism) since I believe many journalists are just doing a “job” which is often persuaded by editors’ and stakeholders’ opinions.

It really depends. But since there is vast people knowledge and tacit knowledge available in our social networks (and the conversations are often more substantive than “I like building treehouses too”), I believe search will benefit from trying to exploit these networks in some way.