Q&A with Marissa Mayer from Google at VentureBeat:
VentureBeat: How would you describe social search?
Marissa Mayer: We believe social search is any search aided by a social interaction or a social connection… Social search happens every day. When you ask a friend “what movies are good to go see?” or “where should we go to dinner?”, you are doing a verbal social search. You’re trying to leverage that social connection to try and get a piece of information that would be better than what you’d come up with on your own.
We know that because of the volume of searches like this that happen everyday, that the social component of search is actually very important, and it hasn’t translated well yet to the internet medium.
VB: What is the future of search?
MM: If we look at a search engine ten years from now, we know it will be better than Google is today. Google itself gets better every single day because we’re constantly making changes to the relevance… I think one way it will be better is in understanding more about you and understanding more about your social context: Who your friends are, what you like to do, where you are. It’s hard to imagine that the search engine ten years from now isn’t advised by those things.
Given how things have transitioned online – everything from travel planning to purchasing books — my belief is that a lot of those physical questions we ask now – “what movies are good to see?”, “where’s the nearest sushi restaurant that’s good?”, those kinds of questions, will ultimately begin to transition to the online medium and that social context will be leveraged there.
[Special thanks for contributions to interview questions and the topic: Ada Chen, Chris Campbell, Dan Ackerman-Greenberg, Eugene Shteyn, Greg Sterling, Ido Green, Jack Abraham, Jared Morgenstern, Jessica Alter, Jim Scheinman, John Battelle, Jon Turow, Julian Gutman, Kara Swisher, Noah Lichtenstein, Sachin Rekhi, Satya Patel, Vik Singh and Zach Weinberg.]
[Disclosure: Doug Sherrets owns a small number of Facebook shares.]
