The last section of my post is written in the context of three presumptions: 1) that the nature of search will change because of social connections; 2) that social is more than just Facebook, and also more than just your circle of friends; 3) social data is proprietary to specific sites, and thus requiring more information than what can be obtained by a search engine from the information on the page or from the user session and cookies.

So thank you for raising the very valid questions that need to be elucidated — I’m sure others who read my post have similar questions.

But one niggly point I’d like to make. While Google enjoys tremendous loyalty and usage (me included) I can’t help but notice the small but significant incursions Bing has been making, especially in crucial “decision” areas like shopping, travel, and local. According to Compete.com and Hitwise, Bing powers 24-26% of search in the US (including Yahoo), which is far from “tiny”. Google’s market share in 2002? It was 29%, albeit, against similarly sized competitors.

Social search is far from a knock out blow to Google, and I have the utmost respect for the folks there behind the social search effort, especially Bradley Horowitz. But their lack of leadership in this space is significant by its absence.

Right now, FB’s like button is showing up everywhere and Bing’s use of this signal sounds big until you point out Google already measures over 200 signals in their algorithm. On the other hand, large ecommerce sites rely on FB and Twitter social stream tracking software PLUS most people don’t know what an algorithm is so appears Bing is doing smart marketing here.

I agree, useful, relevant, compelling content is a search engine favorite which continues to become more valuable over time. I’m definitely clicking the “like” button on this post. :)

One concern that I would have in all of this, though, is that Facebook Friends are increasingly being altered by the addition of weak ties into the Facebook Friending process. I’m sure that many, many people really do limit their Friends to real friends, family and colleagues – people they’ve met in person. Other people, including you and I, have a number of weak ties in our Facebook social graph and a large portion of these could be people we’ve never met in person.

This can be a good or a bad thing. It could be good because you’re probably very likely to share at least one common interest with a weak tie and it may be the type of thing that you don’t have in common with the people that you interact with in person. These weak ties could actually be excellent signals to cut through the noise on specific topics.

But then there’s the trust factor. How much do you really know, respect and trust someone you’ve never met before?

Exactly. It depends. And that same logic applies to the people you know as well.

Just because I see my best friend’s Like of something, there’s a number of heuristics that I go through in my mind to determine whether or not I will follow their lead.

After all, we’re not robots, nor are we lemmings. Some people will blindly follow other people. Other people, not so much.

I think Danny’s take on it seems pretty level headed: baby steps. May have lots of potential. Watch with interest. The field is still pretty open.