Plain old search, even with taxonomy-enhanced navigation and filtering, seems so outdated. What we crave now is the context and perspective that's possible only through human input. What do my colleagues think is noteworthy? Who's working on projects that are similar to mine? How can I keep abreast of what people whose judgment I trust are doing? How can I organize my own sources into categories that will make it easy to find them later?

In the print publishing model, professional editors and librarians provided much of the human input, but this option isn't feasible for much intranet content. One answer is "social search" - a system that determines the relevance of search results by considering the interactions or contributions of users. But how well does it work on internal corporate networks?

In this article we show how social search can work within an enterprise, either by integrating the function with a search engine or using an external content aggregator such as Lexis/Nexis. Next, we list some of the practical implementation challenges discussed by participants in our recent roundtables. Finally, we review the enterprise social search offerings of four vendors.

What is "social search?"
You could say that "social search" began when teams of librarians and editors created Web directories such as ...

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Created on November 17, 2008 l Updated on November 20, 2007