Social Search Beats Search – Name That Tune!

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, November 5, 2009 Comments (6)

It’s not often you hear a search engine optimization person like myself say that social media provides better search results (at least not at the moment in the search industry), but I can see an instance where social search may of benefit to a searcher and where the big three search giants might fail. So this is a theory post, if any of you have ever actually tested social search versus traditional search to try to find a song or artist based on a song lyric, please let everyone know

If you are looking for the lyrics to a song and you can’t remember the artist’s name, the title of the song, the name of the album that song was featured in, or the lyrics. Let’s say you can hear the melody in your head and you can remember a part of the lyrics but not enough that when you search query what you think you remember you’ll get the results you want. Ever have that happen? You’re trying to remember a song lyric and can’t?

Well, with social search you can just send up what you remember and ask the crowd to help. Someone else may remember the song based on the butchered lyrics you provide and help you. That’s because humans possess intelligence and robots do not (or search engine bots looking for lyrics based on pages that it can or can’t locate on the web). So ask the question at Yahoo! Answers or within your Facebook or Twitter networks…you never know what you will get back as answers!

Comments (6) Category: Social & Viral Marketing

Read similar posts in Social & Viral Marketing

6 Comments

Comment by Srinivas

Made Thursday, 5 of November , 2009 at 7:29 am

Hi Nick, Your article seems to make perfect sense, people can make better sense of queries than others, so some one like twitter might evolve a search engine where people can respond live to a query and people get paid when the querying person converts(for example download song from itunes), real time live person search!
thinking aloud!! this might even put an end to traditional SEM!
good bye Adwords?..
let me know what you think of this…

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Thursday, 5 of November , 2009 at 8:31 am

Hi Srinivas,
Exactly, a “thinking aloud” social search engine would be a great thing to have. I don’t know if social search will put an end to traditional SEO and PPC (or end Google Adwords) but I think it will continue to evolve and develop and change SEM over the next few years (like SEM has evolved over the past 10 years)…thanks for the comment!

Comment by John Tarsi

Made Friday, 6 of November , 2009 at 6:46 am

I like the idea of this; however this is almost like saying if you were to write a term paper and you simply used your friend’s opinions/comments as your sources of research…that wouldn’t really get you an A I definitely see the value in using Social Media to find some answers to certain questions, but I think the search engines will always prevail when it comes to finding documented and credible sources of information.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Friday, 6 of November , 2009 at 6:53 am

Hi John,
Very good point and great analogy…finding credible sources makes allot of sense…thanks for reading and your comment!

Comment by Lorraine Grula

Made Tuesday, 1 of December , 2009 at 5:57 pm

Hi Nick
Seems to me, both methods have their place. Which works best for any particular search would depend on what you are looking for and what info you possess to start with. It would also matter whether the searcher wanted a human opinion. I would not ask a machine where a “good” place to eat is. But no doubt a machine could better answer, where is the closest Italian Restaurant? Precision? Opinion? Obscure factoid? The SE method would be faster. Neither one will replace the other. They both will be important but my betting money would say 70% SE and 30% social for the speed factor alone.
Thanks!

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Tuesday, 1 of December , 2009 at 6:41 pm

Hi Lorraine,

I like the 70/30 equation that makes total sense!