What Is Search And Social Goldmine?

What would the structure of a social search engine look like?

• Looking for technical answers: How should links be weighted? What would make it the search engine social? Should users be weighted? If so, How? What should the data structure look like? What information should be stored? What database would you use? Etc...

• Answer:

  Right now I would say the best thing is to do the complete opposite of whatever Facebook does. I could be blowing smoke up your butt but in my honest opinion their algorithm is terrible. Supposedly they hired former Google engineers but it does not reflect in their advertising ecosystem or their organic search. It is not at all intuitive to user searches. Compared to other social networks such as Meetup, Facebook has terrible internal algorithm and it's reflected in when you actually Google a company's name their Facebook can be in the 5th position and a meetup surrounding their company or topic is in the 2nd or 3rd position. This is because they not only suck with their internal algorithm but their compatibility with Google's algorithm in actually being compliant regarding meta tag descriptions must also be terrible. Google "Tourism Office of Spain". You will find LinkedIN there but no sight of Facebook. Why? Because there is something gravely wrong with their algorithm and keyword mapping. It's because when you are the actual Tourism Office of Spain apparently if you do not directly alter the page HTML you will therefore not be picked up by the Google algorithm that looks for you under Facebook's domain. Their meta tag description in the Facebook page HTML includes the name which is "See Spain" but not one is going to search for that. People are going to search for "Tourism Office Spain". And nothing comes up. This could be blamed on the advertiser or user of the page but one could say it can also be blamed on the engine itself which cannot interpret user queries the right way. It needs to be programmed for proper user experience and flow. For example if I search for "UK Footballers" I should see "FC _______" " Rooney" hell even maybe "AC Milan" whatever... Something relevant. I see fan pages. Nobody cares about those. I don't want to see the "official fan page of Sheffield I want to see footballers "Who I forgot the name of but if I see his face I'll remember right away." That type of thing. Those "official" fan pages should be appearing on the 3rd and 4th page of the Facebook SERP. Why aren't the highest volume and most popular results appearing on the 1st page? I know it's not possible to completely emulate Google's algorithm but there is a chance you can get damn near close. Twitter is one that is certainly better at it than Facebook and LinkedIN is top dog right now in my opinion. They have some pretty smart people over there. Not a tremendously technical answer but from a UX/UI standpoint I hope this gives you some guidance.