Google gets social search. I told you so?

It’s a cliche in entrepreneurial circles to say that your idea was “ahead of it’s time.” So let me feed fuel to the cliche by pointing out that Google’s new “Trusted Social Search” is exactly what I was talking about five years ago when I launched my Outfoxed project which, with many changes, went on to become Lijit Networks.

The three phases of search, with outfoxed as the final stage: social search.
The three phases of search, with outfoxed as the final stage: social search.

Google description of Social Search, on their help page:

The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from your best friend can be even better.

About Outfoxed from 2005:

The essential idea of Outfoxed is that people make decisions based primarily on a few people whom they trust. The average person has a set of experts whom they consult in designated areas: the computer expert, the car expert, the fashion expert, the financial expert. If the opinions of these experts can be collected, they are incredibly useful: it is this metadata (data about other data) that gives the most intelligent filtering and sorting of the information on the internet.

It feels both validating and frustrating to see the idea finally coming to light. As a graduate student excited about my “discovery,” I couldn’t see why people just couldn’t grasp what I was trying to explain. Everyone heard “social” and immediately thought I was proposing a Wikipedia approach to work.

What has changed in the last five years? Most importantly, “Social Graph” has gone mainstream. Everyone now understands the concept which I struggled so hard to explain to would-be investors: people connecting to each other — as friends, as subscribers, as followers — creates a network of trusted relationships.

Just because Google has implemented my old ideas still doesn’t make it a success. As impressive as Twitter and Facebook have been at amassing social graphs, we still are in the early days of learning what can be done with a real live trust network among millions of people.

I can’t wait to see what the future looks like, even if it always seems to arrive late.

Nutshell overview of Outfoxed

Search Engine Land coverage of Google Social Search

Search Engine Land on next phase of search, eerily similar to my post on the Third Phase of Search.