Social Search

Social search and tagging.

Google Social Search is one of many new players in this space. Google Search started in October 2009. Google acquired Aardvark in February 2010 because it augments social search by allowing questions to be asked directly to your friends and friends of friends.

Microsoft responded on June 9, 2010 with an announcement of social search on Bing: bing.com/social. Bing released a new feature on December 15th to integrate social networks into search results to a mixed response.

Facebook began rolling out its Facebook Questions feature on July 28, 2010. How will it do against existing websites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Mahalo?

This overview is from Google Search Answers page.

Maureen Heymans, Technical Lead for Google Search, demonstrates the features of Google Social Search in this video.