Search Results Based on Your Social Network

A new company, Delver, is offering a new take on web searching that plans to make your social network a part of the equation. "Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site connects information about a user's social network with Web search results, "so you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph." He explains that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name. Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user--such as a public LinkedIn profile--and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom."

Comments

I don't know about you

[TubeSteak]

But my "social graph" doesn't begin to be represented by my name(s).

I think this will just bias search results towards your friends who have the most free time, not necessarily the most informed or informative. I'm sure we all have that friend who thinks David Icke is right about the reptilians. Do you want his tagged sites at the top of every search you make related [stuff]?

Re:I don't know about you

[davetd02]

This seems to take the concerns that people have about Google's aggregation of your data to a whole new level. Now they know not only what YOU like, but who your friends are and what THEY like too. It wouldn't be hard to make a map of the socialists, anarchists, anti-corporatists, etc, and then round them all up when there's a crime. I'm not saying that our society is anywhere near that level, but it seems to create a big risk of guilt-by-association.

Re:I don't know about you

[ShieldW0lf]

Who would want to use a search engine that put the answers from the experts at the bottom and the answers they could easily get by asking their mom or their roommate at the top?

Sounds pretty damned stupid if you ask me.

Re:I don't know about you

[ShieldW0lf]

For a lot of people, which do you think would be more useful to them: The critics/reviews all hate this movie/item/type/etc, I won't go see/get/try it. My friends/aquantances/coworkers all like/bought/ this movie/item/thing/etc, I should go see/get/try it.

The advice of critics and strangers, of course. They do not need a search engine to find out what their friends think, they can just talk to them. This strikes me as a way to further estrange people from each other by allowing them to filter out any dissenting views before they should be forced to confront them. Beyond being a dumb idea, it's socially harmful.

Re:I don't know about you

[ShieldW0lf]

You miss the point. You are on Slashdot, so must have similar interests to me, even though we never meet. THAT is what they're trying to do. Your opinion is probably more relevant than the "raw" results from Google would ever be 75% of the time.

You clearly didn't read the article. What you are describing, however interesting it might be, is not what this project is doing. What this project is doing is rating things associated with my sister highest, my cousin next, my friends next, my co-workers next, my old school chums next, and the rest of the web last.

From the article:

Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user--such as a public LinkedIn profile--and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom.

This is not intended to inform and give people knowledge that wasn't already at their disposal. It is intended to tempt people with things that they might buy on the assumption that their tastes are similar to their friends. It is not a good thing, unless you're looking to be amused or marketed to.

Terrible idea

[KublaiKhan]

This sort of searching will result in information from "opposing sides" of controversies or arguments being deprecated, resulting in skewed information being available--because people tend to associate themselves with other people of the same opinion.

E.G., all my friends are emacs people, so the first results will favor emacs, and any vi-related articles will be deprecated. Other nontrivial examples can be extrapolated.

This will merely serve to re-enforce any prejudice, bias, or slant that a person may have. Reading competing materials--seeing things that challenge one's own point of view--can only be healthy for one's point of view, rendering it much more cosmopolitan and much less insular than it would otherwise be.

In short: this new search engine will be wildly popular amongst the type of person who enjoys violent flamewars, and will be useless for any person who wishes to consider both sides of a situation before forming an opinion. ......so it's going to be an enormous success and if I had the cash I'd invest in it. :-/

Re:Terrible idea

[Chysn]

> this new search engine will be wildly popular amongst the type of person who
> enjoys violent flamewars

See, I think it would be wildly popular with people who avoid flamewars in favor of echo chambers.

Excuse my scepticism

[4D6963]

Seriously, can anyone see this being more pertinent than regular searches? I don't know about you people, but I don't necessarily have much in common with my few friends, so if a friend of mine is into Paris Hilton or international law that's not necessarily going to improve my search results in any good way.

Hysteresis of a Social Network

[NetSettler]

This kind of approach has the hidden danger that once you fall into a certain crowd, it's hard to dig your way out. It substantially increases the importance of choosing the right one because you might never climb out.

Consider how many people think they are Democrats or Republicans just because their parents are. (Parents are just an example, so don't be too quick to say that parents aren't the chosen network. There will be some chosen network and unless its attributes are freely advertised, you'll be signing up to have things done for you in ways that are subtle and related to others you think you know. It might just as well be "those drug fiends you kids run around with".)

Until the mid-1990's, I used to subscribe to paper magazines about technical topics. And I'd get a lot of junk mail from vendors offering me stuff. Increasingly, I found they talked about object-oriented programming and other topics I liked. At first, I thought all my topics were winning the hearts and minds of people. But after a while, I realized they had just pigeon-holed me as interested only in those topics. What started off as a benefit they were offering me was now a kind of Hell I had to live in... I'm sure there's some relevant Twilight Zone episode I should be referencing here, but you get my point.

Freedom comes with choice. One reason that a lot of people don't like political primaries is that it limits choice. If you can control the primary process (which has traditionally gotten very little oversight--though this year probably got more than average), you have a great deal of control of the election. People focus on the election as the thing that can be tampered with, and they make a polite fuss about who gets invited to this and that debate, about who takes this and that money, about the price of media, and so on. But it's those things, not a few hanging chads in the vote itself, that probably really sway the election. The damage is already done by time you reach the voting booth.

And what if everyone in the network is trusting everyone else, and no one is at the helm? Or what if someone deviates from the network--is that weighted low as anomalous or high as important that it wasn't statistically predicted and might signify something the group should peer at? I don't see leaving these questions to a search engine... I think people should retain this right and responsibility.