“The Road More Traveled”
Problem
Knowledge and resources surfaced by search engines can feel impersonal and irrelevant at times. It doesn’t have to be this way — there are certain question journeys that people have all searched at some point in their life. How can we showcase what our friends have found valuable in the past and highlight knowledge pathways that are highly traversed?
Solution
Contrary to Robert Frost’s belief is the idea that the road more traveled is the more valuable route. By presenting a social / multiplayer search, we can see what friends have searched and discovered before and traverse their routes of best content.
User searches a query → they star the best content
Next time another user searches the same query → they see the best content starred from friends, and also see when the friend last searched it
Storyboard
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Value Prop
Making search feel more personable, bringing in a social layer to finding the right information you’re looking for online.
References
Did some more digging and realized Google released a “social search” in 2009 — however the main difference is it aims to showcase content your friends have created, less so the content your friends have found valuable.
Introducing Google Social Search: I finally found my friend's New York blog!
Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person.
googleblog.blogspot.com
Search is getting more social
Late last year we released the Social Search experiment to make search more personal with relevant web content from your friends and online contacts. We were excited by the number of people who chose to try it out, and today Social Search is available to everyone in beta on google.com.
googleblog.blogspot.com