Will social search save the day?

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First it was news that Google and Microsoft Bing had each made their own agreements with either Facebook, Twitter or both to include them in search results. Now it’s news that Google has turned on the social search functionality as an opt-in service through Google Labs.

There is no shortage of talk online about this development, both tnooz: ‘Google makes travel search three-dimensional with Social Search‘ and ReadWriteWeb: ‘Google Search Gets Personal: Social Search Launches in Google Labs‘ are good articles on the finer details.

Photo from sparkle★rawk's Flickr

Do you start you travel research at Google?

An interesting aspect of all this is how it will impact travel.  A Google search is already the main starting point for many travellers when thinking about a trip abroad, hence the competition amongst travel companies associated with buying Adwords in order to show up for popular search terms, and the intensive SEO campaigns run by businesses based around keywords.

Real-time search only appeared relatively recently with the rise of Twitter and now we’re seeing the next stage as search companies leverage our extensive social activity on the Web to create personalised, relevant results.  Will more travel companies be cozying up to Twitter and Facebook users?

Google arrives as the biggest social network

Suddenly Google’s stealth in building its own social network without the walls of a site like Facebook or MySpace is starting to show.  The fact is that searching on Google has become such an integral part of the internet experience that it no longer really requires a home page – who starts their searches at Google.com? who keeps tabs on the changing Google logo anymore? – whereas even sites as big as Facebook are still largely locked behind their login page.  Once again Google is the aggregator.

Goodbye SEO campaigns, hello engagement

Google search result pages for hotels and destinations have become such a battle field for the top spots that any search is far from organic these days, listings are the result of carefully crafted SEO strategies run by any savvy travel company.  I’d much rather rely on search listings extracted from my social circle – these are generally trusted people who aren’t pushing brands without having an opinion I’m likely to share in.

The search we’ve always wanted

Mahalo tried the human powered search,  new companies like Tripbod are walking a similar path but as social search improves and takes off, all of a sudden technology might start to produce the sort of relevant, personalized search results that we’ve all been yearning for.  The strong values based businesses with loyal followers and keen brand ambassadors will be brought to the fore ahead of huge, search optimised websites like Expedia.

A social search reaching into all our social activity sounds like exactly what we need to help deal with the overflow of information, the ever increasing number of social sites and also as a way to put some trust back into reviews and recommendations.

Keep connecting, keep engaging

For all those small businesses taking a guerilla approach to marketing, connecting with consumers through social media and letting word of mouth do the talking, search might just be beginning to favour you… thank goodness.