Booshaka – the social search engine
-
Lee
3 years ago -
1151
views
John’s recent post about Google vs Facebook and the differences in the two systems was spot on.
Google is where I find products; Facebook is where I get abuse (and a lot of it from my mates) – end of. At this time, my stance has not changed when playing with ‘Booshaka’, the social search engine.
Social Search Example #1 – Wine Glasses
When performing a search from Wine Glasses, I am fed with nothing but noise about how people are going to get drunk and how many glasses of wine it will take to do it. What has this got to do with wine glasses? This is the subject that I wanted to know about.
Social Search Example #2 – iPad
What a waste of time even looking at this term. The majority of noise was about how people were thinking about getting an iPad in the next coming days or from people who could not work the iPad. Thanks socialweb, not one bean of credible information (at the time of performing the search).
Social Search Example #3 – Fish Tank
Real-time results for ‘fish tanks’ include: “fish tank is leaking………super”, “ian hast hired out his fish tank to sky tv so they can make more episodes of the deadliest catch in unhappy aqarium”, this is not to mention a really terrible joke that someone had posted.
Booshaka Conclusions
I cannot say that I am going to be jumping ship to a pure social search engine in the near future. Perhaps when I have some spare time and feel like delving into the lives of people that I have no connection with than I might pump a few search terms in.
Am I simply missing the point?
In all seriousness I cannot see George McDougal from Townchester influencing my decision to purchase a product from his personal rants . Booshaka is simply passing the latest information being shared on Facebook; and that is the problem. For someone who is researching a product, service or company there is simply too much noise to cut through with the Booshaka offering at this time.
I’m all for innovation, but there is no apparently relevancy filter with the results in Booshaka. Now Yandex is a real breath of fresh air to the search world, but that is for another day. Suffice to say I won’t be calling on the Booshaka again in the very near future.
Hi Lee,
This is an interesting post, although the results you found are nothing less than what I expected from a social search engine to be honest and right now I am not sure which direction of imprevement would yield the most interest for digital companies.
Social networking is all about sharing opinions/points of view/experiences and I guess that when people are talking about real life situations they are going to talk about how, for example, they used a wine glass to drink wine and by extension, get drunk. I suppose you are not really going to find the ins an outs of how to make a wine glass (for example) on something like Facebook.
At present this is clearly a qualitative tool, something which would require qualitative analysis.
Still, I think it has some uses and will certainly be interesting to see how such a tool develops.
I agree Liz – it is interesting to see a ‘social’ search engine. It will be even more interesting to see who can crack the social search nut with real aplomb first.
i can understand your point on the noise and the stupid jokes being delivered by the social search, and it is very much understandable because that’s the sort of thing we find on facebook and twitter in general. However, these are real people posting their experience which makes such statement honest while on Google you will find excellent editorial/advertorial but the question remains that how much of it we can actually trust.
but yes, social search needs to be filtered a lot, hope those moderators at the social search engines do that actively, as the noise and stupid jokes will always be at high, on those social platforms…