Bing and Google are both trying to turn search into a social experience.
Google is doing it by integrating the Google Side-wiki into search, by incorporating Google buzz results into your search results, with Google me, and other recent stabs at the combination of search and social. They’re trying new ones all the time.
Bing is doing it by connecting up to Facebook, seeing who your friends are, what they like, and including those likes into your search results.
The point is they’re both competing to bring you a more social search, seemingly operating with “the web is social now, let’s make search social” as their mantra.
This, to me, translates to, “Let’s change what makes search valuable into something entirely different”.
I can see why they feel the money lies in combining the two. But they should not mix the two beyond the absolute minimum and they should maintain the possibility of keeping them completely separate.
Here’s what they’re running up against:
Search is valuable because it allows the searcher to find what they otherwise cannot find.
Social is valuable because it allows you to immerse yourself in what you’ve already chosen to know.
A search is an outward reach, so by its very nature it spreads beyond the scope of the known into the unknown. I don’t mean to get spiritual here, but it is philosophically on a higher plane than social media.
Searchers inherently trust the search engine to bring them new experiences, new options, new choices and new solutions which are outside their sphere. OUTSIDE their sphere. By the very nature of social, that is anethema to including social results.
Social is the antithesis of search.
Both play well together, both are needed at different times to solve different needs.
Think about it. As a marketer or website owner, you’ve always known this inherently.
A search click is generally more valuable because of “need” – what is meant by that is that the person is looking for something new to solve some problem for themselves at the time they search. They’re actively expanding their horizons in response to a need. And as such, the likelihood that you can sell them something new in response to that “need” is much, much higher.
That “need” is exactly why social and search are oil and water… they just don’t mix well.
Search shoots itself in the foot by trying to play to two such completely different mentalities on the search engine results pages. If they don’t continue to 100% feed us what we’re there for–new and unknown things– and if they don’t reinforce our ingrained firm belief in search–that something new is out there–and if they instead serve up what we already know or can find through social media–then they will lose some of our trust and respect, even if they engage us in the process.
And they are engaging us.We will initially be thrilled. But social media is not where the money is in search, and that is not where the value lies in search.
Search doesn’t need to become more social. Social needs to become more searchable.
The internet does us no favors if it gets more closed, more relationship and reality-based. Search IS the expanding horizon of philosophy now, and it IS the changing, morphing hope for improvement. When someone wants to improve or increase themselves mentally now, they search.
When they want the status quo, they go social.
And that makes all the difference.