Opinion: Search engines for social–another new chapter?

Speaking in an interview with TechCrunch in the recent past, Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook has a billion searches per day and he also went on to quip that Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer queries of users more effectively than normal search engines. And it was not too long ago that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said that akin to search engines which help in converting consumers who already have the purchase intent, Facebook also has potential to play in the bottom funnel space (i.e. demand fulfilment), in addition to helping marketers build brands and generate demand.

Which brings us to a very thought-provoking question: Do search engines within social platforms on one hand, and search engines within the social space on the other hand, have the might to create a separate, specialised social search meme, eventually?

The Facebook search

To arrive at some conclusion on the former half of the question (i.e. search experience within social platforms), it is imperative to zoom in on the current state of search in the largest global social networking platform. That the current state of search within the social networking giant called Facebook is nothing to write home about becomes quickly evident when one tries to search for anything beyond people, places and to some extent specific things. 

Even within this bastion, there is a dearth of quality and quantity of content when one gets more specific, and this phenomenon becomes even more pronounced if you happen to search for places or things that aren’t exactly in the mainstream. Talking mainstream, try a search for say "rentals Sydney" and the resultant output is no more than a few random results, beyond which Facebook conveniently passes the buck over to the results powered by Bing. Not exactly what a ‘social citizen’ would have in mind in the light of the fact that he used a social platform as his search engine!

But when one delves a bit deeper into the real opportunities that a huge platform like Facebook has in the demand fulfilment (or "last mile" as I call it) arena, albeit latent, a few roads with vast potential begin to surface. Imagine the immense opportunity in the form of local search within the environment if Facebook could spruce up its offering and get users to search for local businesses? This will in time trigger more quantity and quality of content on the supply-side and trigger increasing local search behavior on the demand-side. 

Again, imagine the immense and hugely contextual opportunity in the form of holiday accommodation search within the social fabric? What if Facebook can successfully grow the holiday-search beast and bring to life a quality search experience that is powered by the Likes, Fans, Check-ins and so on? Wouldn’t this be paving a glorious path into the future social-holiday-search experience, which again will gather critical momentum with the demand-supply side activity multiplying over time?

The possibilities are restricted only by the imagination in this instance, and if Facebook were to invest enough in moulding this user-powered search experience, there is no doubt that the overall Facebook experience would get decidedly pleasant and ultimately also power Sheryl’s demand fulfilment play statement, because social citizens will quickly hop-on to the searching within social experience.

The search 'TROVE'

Homing in on the search engine within social space aspect of the question above, the perfect answer is the new kid-on-the-block called TROVE, which packs an impressive search punch as a debuting search engine within the social space. 

Although this social search engine is currently hinging on Facebook search only, it’s ambitions are definitely hinging on anything but replacing Facebook search. Trove aims to create a new beast itself within the social fabric—the true search engine for social. In my opinion, this is an important milestone in the long highway in to social search experience and an impressive one at that. I urge you to go ahead and link up your account with Trove as it will take a few days for the connection to be active.

So what exactly does Trove do? Once the Facebook API is active (or once you have connected with Facebook), the engine crawls all the content associated with your account and your connections’ accounts (that the Facebook API allows, of course) to create a searchable index. And once the index has been created, the searchable index is ready for you to jump in and start your search-research, which I personally found to be quite remarkable given that the social search engine results page (SSERP, if you will) is replete with rich content (images, videos, posts, apps, maps and the like) that has been ordered based on dates and is contextual in nature (versus just blindly matching a word or phrase). 

This means that a search for "rentals Sydney" in my previous example would throw up contextual stuff like home stay, hotels, related videos and user comments that would be a huge value-add for the social searcher, which paves the way for creating an advanced and powerful contextual graph based on how people speak.

In my opinion, it is only a matter of time before social search engines carve out a gargantuan space within the social world—and possibly chew away a significant share of search from the conventional search giants. And as I sign off, I quickly catch myself affectionately peering back at the days of Archie (the first search, whose name stood for Archive without a V) followed by Veronica and Jughead (Gopher index systems). And I'm realising all over again that the humongous evolution that search has gone through in the last decade is nothing less than jaw-dropping.