If you haven’t jumped on the social media bandwagon for social media sake, would you for the benefit or search? In this recent article, Research at Google published an abstract on understanding social annotations (social media data). The article states, “As web search increasingly becomes reliant on social signals, it is imperative for us to understand the effect of these signals on users’ behavior.”
This can mean a few things, the first of which is including social information in search results. For example, how many friends of John Doe Facebook liked a website that John Doe just searched for on Google. If Google were to display social insights like that, John Doe is more likely to click on the results. Secondly, if John Doe is more likely to click on a site that more of his friends like, why not rank that site higher to encourage that very click?
