Search has not been at the forefront for many social media sites. They’ve focused on drawing traffic, building a brand, and looking for a business model. But, there is a great opportunity for social media sites to leverage search in new ways. I decided to take a look at a few top social media sites to examine how they’re using search and what’s missing.

The sites I selected were drawn from top site lists on Web2Center and Technorati. (Interestingly, I had difficulty finding the top 100 blog list on Technorati through its site search. I had to resort to a web search.)

What Can We Learn

The common denominator across these sites is to have a standard search box with a results list showing basic information about an item, and in most cases, some teaser text. Beyond that there is variation, with some sites not doing much more than the basics.

1. Old News is Old News

Freshness is an important factor in search. Social media often becomes a sequential feed. Allowing users to sort and view by date gives them a reference point from their last visit.

[Click to Enlarge]	[Click to Enlarge]
Squidoo provides sort by recently updated	Digg lets you narrow by timeline and anchors on how long something has been popular

2. Show Me What’s Popular and What’s Authoritative

Social media volume is growing. Providing insight into popularity and authority helps users make a decision to explore or not.

[Click to Enlarge]	[Click to Enlarge]
lifehacker shows # of views and comments	Digg shows # of diggs and comments and top across all topics
[Click to Enlarge]
Technorati gives an authority ranking based on “the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months”

3. Categorize To Help Me Navigate

The cloud navigation feature started with “most popular” lists. But what about most interesting to me? Enter tag clouds.

Categorization, both predefined and user-defined, is an important way to help users digest content, find related information, and navigate directly to what they like.

[Click to Enlarge]	[Click to Enlarge]
Technorati provides a tag cloud that is dynamic and changes constantly while you’re sitting on a page (while it’s interesting to see this, I don’t know if the value outweighs the distraction it creates)	Engadget provides static categories, but they’re buried below the fold
[Click to Enlarge]
TechCrunch allows you to navigation by company or product

4. Connect Me to the Community

Social media sites expand connections to link users to users. Not only does this allow users to build a community and find experts, it also helps them uncover new content by exploring what others are viewing.

[Click to Enlarge]	[Click to Enlarge]
Digg lets you see a contributor’s favorites, recent activity, history, friends and their activities, and digg stats – great insight into a contributor’s behavior and likes	StumbleUpon shows recent “stumblers” and provides “people who like” front and center at the top of search results
[Click to Enlarge]
Technorati links you to a contributor’s blogs and exposes how popular each blog is

What’s the Opportunity

Through social media, search teams have a new source of input. With this they can build new practices around “social search” taking all the clues provided to uncover user behavior, intent and preferences. Social search is not limited to externally-facing sites. It also can be applied to sites behind the firewall that employ social media techniques.

Some additional ways search teams might use this input include:

• Making use of comments. Core content is searched against and exposed, but comments provide an additional source of content.
• Interpreting and exposing sentiment. Sentiment gives us great insight into opinions and preferences (see A Certain Sentiment in the Air).
• Using behavior as a feedback loop. Social media is a rich source of user interaction with content and it is captured in a real day-to-day situation. This behavior can be used as input to user experience design supplementing what is gathered through simulated tests or surveys.

We are just starting to tap the value of this source and the ways in which we use the input will expand.