Yahoo aims to deliver a more relevant and satisfying search experience through social search. In other words, to provide better search through people - combining what people know with Web search technology.

The next chapter: ‘collective sharing’

Collective sharing is arguably the next chapter of the Web, with the user turning publisher. Barriers to entry for content creation on the Web are constantly being lowered and new technologies are allowing people to create, develop, produce, market and sell content in ways previously unimaginable.

The bulk of relevant human knowledge – particularly the community-based knowledge that’s highly valued by individual searchers - still resides with people and not in mathematical algorithms. Today, search breakthroughs will come from rich new sources of metadata and user-generated content. The collective knowledge in a user’s community will become the driver for more relevant search results.

When searching for restaurants, for example, friends should be able to poll each other's collected knowledge of information – either via tags and other metadata attached to websites by users or through direct engagement with other users in a search environment. Released this month, Yahoo! Answers is a social search experience, complementing algorithmic search by delivering real-life answers in an engaging environment.

Social search takes advantage of other people’s acquired knowledge and experiences in previously locating and experiencing the same information. Therefore, search results are more relevant based on the previous work of others.

The implications of the rise of social search

So what are the implications of the rise in social search for marketers and for the advertising industry?

Predictions by eMarketer (July 2006) estimate that ad spending on US online social networks will eclipse $1.8bn by 2010. While market forecasting isn’t always an exact science, statistics like these do however demonstrate that marketers are recognising the potential that social search offers. Like any marketing trend before it, the earlier marketers get on board, the quicker they can get a jump on their competitors.

The rise in communities and group wisdom has an important impact on marketing because it breeds an experience-based culture – consumers are no longer solely influenced by tangible factors like price and features. Although social media appears to be largely a separate entity at present, going forward, the best sites will find ways to weave social media into their core, creating powerful communities.

Monetisation and community ownership

However, all social media sites must be mindful that the characteristics of flexibility, freedom and community ownership that initially attracted their vast audiences need to be carefully balanced with any attempt at monetisation – as history has proven, audiences can easily disperse to other destinations if they feel a site has become too commercial.

In essence, social media offers brands an opportunity to engage with customers – and elements of social search products will provide this opportunity in the future.

Integrate your campaigns

Another key area of focus for online marketers this year will be to fully integrate online campaigns with each other and into the rest of the mix. Increasingly, search marketers are looking at the use of search marketing for branding purposes and to drive purchases offline: marketers now appear to be taking a more holistic view of search and looking at how it can complement other campaigns across different forms of marketing.

Additional global research undertaken by Carat Isobar and Yahoo! reflects this - entitled 'Fluid Lives', the global study showed that offline media often prompts people to go online - and moreover, more and more people are going online whilst engaging in offline media. Over half of the respondents to our survey spent time online whilst watching TV, to find out more information about what they're watching and simply to multi-task.

So, if your website is not listed high in the search results for ‘cheap flight’ at the peak of your TV ad campaign, imagine the number of customers you could be missing out on. Furthermore, it could actually have a negative effect on your brand. Our research in France found that having seen an advertisement offline, if a user could not find the advertiser’s website through search, this had a negative effect on the user’s perception of the brand in more than one out of three cases. Proof indeed of the importance of search in any advertising campaign....

By Stephen Taylor,
Regional Vice President,
Yahoo! Search and Search Marketing, Europe