I have no problem referencing one of your posts I tried to not look at who is winning or even likely to win because we do not know how these tools will evolve. If you look at Google’s social search, it really is not that good yet. Google also tries to make everything fit the search model, and they do not have a good history of really changing things. So, I am thinking that the playing field is fairly open. It will be interesting to see how all of the tools evolve.

1. First, thanks for referencing my post.

2. I absolutely agree that social search is useless without context.

3. My post was about who is likely to win in the long run. Needless to say, there are many obstacles in the path towards social search nirvana. My point is if anyone is likely to reach there, it will be Google, rather than anyone else.

4. Considering the example of searching for “javascript charts and graphs”, if the person you are following on Twitter (but not on Digg) has ever tweeted anything about javascript charts, you should get that tweet (or even the linked site) in your social search.

5. I think the mechanisms to evolve an understanding of relevance in social search will combine algorithms and user actions. Today, Magic Sort in Google Reader works off your likes and sharing patterns. Clicks on search results are monitored to refine the relevancy algorithms. UI features like “Did you mean” or “More like these” or “Similar” can be further enhanced so that social search augments regular web search.

The end is not yet in sight, but Facebook doesn’t seem to even qualify for the race.