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The Future of Social Search (Or Why Google Should Buy Facebook)

December 31, 2008
by Eric Schonfeld
Co-Editor, TechCrunch

Eric Schonfeld

If you could search your friends’ thoughts, interests, and activities, would that be a better search experience? In many cases, it would be. Searching for restaurants, books, or movies, would turn up recommendations from people you actually know. If you are researching a trip to Florence, Italy, you might discover 10 friends who have been there already, and could ask for advice on what to do. These scenarios have been the dream of social search for a few years, with both start-ups and search engines taking a stab at it. But so far it’s been a failed dream.

Yahoo’s (YHOO) experiment with social search, Yahoo 360 MyWeb, never took off. is being shut down. It was a rudimentary social search in that relevant bookmarks from friends showed up as search results. And search has never been Facebook’s strong suit.

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