Thursdays on AltSearchEngines we welcome a Guest Author to our blog. Last week we heard from Bob Warfield of the SmoothSpan Blog with his recently published two-part series entitled, Why Don’t Search Startups Share Data? (aka Open Source Style Web Crawling) Part 1 and Part 2.  This has stretched into a third part, entitled “Social Graph Search Engines”

Here’s Part 3:

I’ve inadvertently stumbled onto a topic that’s getting tremendous attention, so I wanted to sum up my thoughts here before moving on.

Let’s start with Robert Scoble’s post, Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years.  Scoble’s proposition, which he communicates well in three videos, is that by using the Social Graph, we can dramatically reduce SEO Spam in search results.  The source of the Spam is that Google’s current PageRank algorithm is just too easy to game.  You simply need the right keywords together with as many sites linking to the page with the keywords as possible.   That combination does not guarantee a human will see anything of value on the resulting page.  With a Social Graph Search, you will weigh in human judgement about the quality of the page.  You do this by considering factors such as:

-  Did someone from your Trust Fabric (i.e. your social network) write the page?

-  Was it written or linked to by people who you know share similar interests because of the social graph?

And so on.  It’s a good idea, and I had already modified my own search habits to take advantage of a less grandiose form of this by choosing to search blogs before doing a general Internet-wide Google. Read the rest of this entry »