Social Search

It seems that the next frontier in the world of social networking is being tackled by three ex-Googlers who have started "Mechanical Zoo." The new company has successfully raised funds and is attempting to build an application that would allow individuals to search within their networks for information and recommendations based on what it knows about their preferences.

The company is not ready to publicly preview or talk about its technology, but it currently has at least 100 "alpha" users testing the service. According to Ventilla, it will be a Yahoo Answers-type product, with more built-in intelligence about your personal tastes.

"We're tackling the problem of subjective search--when no one answer would satisfy everyone--and the answer is not to serve a Web page," Ventilla said in an interview. "We've developed an online social structure that lets users reach out to people they already know" for answers.

Given the meteoric rise of social networking activity over the past few years, it makes sense that the next step would be to find a way to harness the information contained within any given person's network. According to the article, Mechanical Zoo is not alone in its attempt -- FriendFeed, Delver, and Eurekster are all working on ways to bring a social context to web searches as well. I will be curious to see what all these companies come up with and how it improves upon Facebook functionality. I find it pretty easy to find interesting things going on in my network, but it would doubtless be useful to have a more controllable search capability.