In a strange bit of synchronicity, Google and Facebook both rolled out similar features within 24 hours of each other. Both will now allow users to give feedback on items: In Google’s search results (via Googlified), and Facebook’s newsfeed.
Here’s Google:
And here’s Facebook:
In Google’s case, this is especially interesting as Google had been dismissive of “Social Search” in the past.
In August, I attended a talk by Marissa Mayer, Google’s leading executive on search, who said Google has worked on social search. However, she was somewhat dismissive of the opportunity. She said social search hadn’t shown much promise, but that if someone were to prove its worth, Google would be in a good position to incorporate it. (from VentureBeat )
Although to be fair, this isn’t strictly “social search” in the sense used by Swicki or the former Wink.com search application. In those applications the votes of everyone contributed to ranking of results. Your votes in the Google project apparently only affects your results…for now. (Lijit’s approach is different, being based on the social graph. See my earlier post about Social Search: Democracy or Network?)