Social Search is it people or information...

Recently I see a lot of new initiatives for social search some of them are of large companies like Google that its claim to fame initially was ranking, now is talking about a social ranking of it's results. Also a bunch of small startups that the opportunity of a new ways to rank data based on social graph to create more relevancy and a result that is part of the circle of trust. The Idea of me getting results based on my friends user generated content is important.

Actually when you look at what we are looking in real life to find it’s actually what our friends are doing, it is very important to me that my friend just bought a new pair of Nike more than the fact that the brand is less considered today or they used more for walking than running...

So when I am using social search what do I want to get my friends or the data they have written???

The question is a tough question considering the fact that all the ranking is done using the social graph that is inaccurate as it is not updated to what I think of my friends right now. So getting results as juts URLs of data pages that we have found the text you looked for is not good. Showing the people names is also not good as I want to find what they have thought (good bad)

Using the peoples name as the URL and the data file as where the data was located is the way... the most important thing is to have a visual representation of the toped ranked results, in order for you to choose the result that is most relevant to you right now.

Example:

I am looking for a plumber, got some results but the first two are only 2 degrees of separation one is a plumber of my best friend a rich gal that never worked in her life and don't know anything in home fixing stuff, the other is an old friend of mine haven't seen him for ages and I remember in school he was a type of a handymen as a hobby. Now what is my best choice ????

As you can see ranking in this case is hard and mapping (socially mapping) is the only way to find my best result. Writing a solution of social search should contain text search as well as people profiling as well as map of the results to better direct the right result.