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Plug Your Book!
137
Social search
In the mid 1990s, Yahoo, the first popular Web portal, guided most
Internet traffic with a simple hand-picked menu of sites. Yahoo’s editors
decided which Web sites were worth pointing to, and that’s where the
traffic went. At the time, it seemed like a good system, and much more
efficient than search engines, which tended to spit out mountains of
irrelevant results. Back then, it sometimes seemed easier to find a needle
in a haystack than to find anything with a search engine.
Then Google built a better mousetrap. Instead of relying on humans
to figure out which content is best, Google’s computers determined
relevance and authority. Google’s PageRank system considers not only
the words contained on a Web page, but also how many related sites link
in. Each incoming link is a vote on a page’s importance, helping it rise to
the top of Google’s search results.
As good as Google’s system is, however, it can’t always deliver
relevant results, particularly for specialized content. Sometimes
providing good search results requires direct human brainpower,
something provided by social search tools. Social search works best in
deep niches, where people who truly understand the content render
judgments. In these cases, social search can be more accurate than
Google’s algorithmic search, which counts links only.
Why should authors care about social search? Because more and
more people are using it to find the exact content they want.
Here’s what can happen if your book’s Web site or blog is mentioned
favorably on a social search service—a flood of 5,000 to 10,000 visitors
can come to your site within hours. This crowd can include thousands of
folks highly passionate about your topic, and those nearly impossible to
reach through traditional advertising or publicity.
Dozens of popular sites have emerged in the past few years
providing tools for search, social networking, and social bookmarking:
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