Yesterday, I wrote about the trust levels of different types of searches:

• Fully Automated Search Engines, such as Google, are seeing the trust in the result slowly errode as they become victims of their own success at “indexing the worlds information.” People are beginning to question the ability for automated search results to truly understand context. This is highlighted in the study 2008 Digital Future Report by USC’s Center for the Digital Future:

“A higher percentage of Internet users reported negative views about the reliability and accuracy of information provided by search engines, such as Google. Slightly over half of Internet users — 51 percent — said that most or all of the information produced by search engines is reliable and accurate — down from the 62 percent who reported the same response in 2006.“

• Fully Human Based Search Engines, such as Mahalo, while engendering more trust that automated search engines, are light in content, and the trust only exists to the extent that the searcher trusts the editor. In this discussion, at the Digital Life Design conference, between Jason Calacanis of Mahalo and Jimmy Wales of Wikia, both attempt to apply trust to their editors differently. Jason both pays his editors and has implemented policies and procedures to improve the results. Jimmy, on the other hand, relies on the pride of ownership and participation to improve his results.

• Relationship Based Search: Lijit, the company I work for, is not a search engine. Rather, it attempts to use relationships and the inherent trusted based in those relationships to return results that are much more contextual. This was displayed in the search example from my post from yesterday.

So what does this mean? Today Marissa Meyer, of Google, was interviewed by VentureBeat. In this interview, she defines social search as:

We believe social search is any search aided by a social interaction or a social connection? Social search happens every day. When you ask a friend ?what movies are good to go see?? or ?where should we go to dinner??, you are doing a verbal social search. You?re trying to leverage that social connection to try and get a piece of information that would be better than what you?d come up with on your own.

This is an important definition. There is no way for an automated search to know that you hate horror movies when asked “what movies are good to go see?” There is no way a human powered search result will be able to answer that question, without the social context. (Which is why you see a lot of effort being put into Mahalo Social.) Lijit attempts to be able to answer that question, and Todd Vernon, Lijit’s CEO, does a great job out outlining how.

But, in truth, none of these solutions can do the perfect job. Google doesnt have the social context. Mahalo and Lijit dont have the wealth of content. So, what is the answer?

Simple, combine some element of all three components.

• Google: the sheer ability to collect the worlds information is staggering. As it begins to realize that GMail and other social indicators improve search results, it will attempt to answer the question programmatically. Unless HAL 9000 starts to run the algorithm. Google will never trump the human. Just like the fishing rod.
• Mahalo: Increase the trust in the editors themselves. Continue to do things like live track sporting events. Be the human selected bait.
• Lijit: Continue to expand distribution and improve content discovery. Be the expert who knows where to fish.

Imagine a site that had all three components. The automated collection of data to cover search queries that a human powered search engine cant. The application of trust, through the discovery of the content produced by editors, and the exploration of intrinsic and explicit relationships.

So the destination site would look something like this: it would be a mashup of Mahalo and Google, with the ability on Editor Profile and Mahalo Social pages to search the social content and social network of the humans, provided by Lijit, that are providing results. Human manage the top and topical search queries and Google covers the holes.

Now, I am no longer given the fish, and told to eat it. Rather, I am given a rod, human picked bait and the knowledge of where to fish. And, when I catch the big one, I am going to never trust another way.

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