i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

 Info 202 Blog Post 1, "Google Social Search Screws Up"
2010Sep11
Walter Koning

Google Social Search launched near the close of 2009.  Since then the features have been refined but one feature is causing grief for users.

As background, Google is a search engine.  When you submit content into the search field(s) Google returns relevant results from the internet.  Google Social Search attempts to provide results that are more relevant to you specifically.  They do this by accessing your contacts via your Google profile, then matching your query to results found in your contacts' blog posts, their social networking sites, and any other content associated with them.

Someone recently discovered confusion on the part of Social Search.  It seems that Twitter ID's are being confused for Twitter usernames.  So if your username is 2995 you may get results for ID 2995, or vice versa.  This reminds me of Borges "The Library of Babel" article from lesson 1.

"This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how perse they might be, are made up of the same elements: the space, the period, the comma, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet. He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books."

Although there are no two identical books there may be two identical ways to identify different "books".  The algorithm for returning results in Social Search could be refined to only use the username instead of the ID.  This is an example of what needs to be considered during information retrieval.

http://friskymongoose.com/google-opens-social-search-to-the-public/
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022821.html
http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html