Learning with the Fang

So, you just read the excellent introduction to Google’s new Social Search by rww but can’t wait to try it out for yourself. You belt over to labs.google.com, opt into the Social Search experiment, do a vanity search but there is no ‘Social’ link when you expand + Options! Making sure you have logged in with your google account, you notice the familiar green arrows next to the top couple of results and the ‘more from SearchWiki’ at the bottom of the results list.

That was my first experience with Google’s new Social Search unleashed today. After a fair bit of hunting and pecking it turns out there is a conflict between the old ‘SearchWiki’ experiment (pretty sure I opted in as a google labs experiment way back) and the new ‘SocialSearch’ experiment which can be worked around by disabling ‘SearchWiki’ in my http://www.google.com/preferences page.

Select “Hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment, or add your own results” option under “SearchWiki” at the bottom of your google preferences page.

Having disabled SearchWiki a new search for my own surname yielded the usual gratifying result along with a link to ‘Social’ once I expanded the +Options. Marvellous – key members of my social network have been talking about me – and it’s easy to figure out what they have said. It also turns out that I was involved in some rather fruity dialogue with someone we shall call ‘Nick’ via comments on a blog post back in 2006.

That, my friends, is a perfect example of why we need to be careful with what we say online. Things previously ‘hidden’ will come to light in new and interesting ways as technology evolves. And I, for one, can’t wait!!! Bring on face recognition in flickr I say.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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