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There was an article last week on PCWorld about Google VP of search Marissa Mayer talking to IDGNS about the perfect search engine and the secret of Google's success in search.

Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said during the company's earnings call that Google had implemented about 120 search quality improvements during the third quarter as it moves toward its ultimate goal: "We want to get to the perfect search engine."

So, IDG News Service asked Mayer the following: "What is the perfect search engine? If you had a magic wand and could create it, what would it look like? What would it do?"

Mayer responded about being able to interpret speech, images/pictures, localization, personalization, and other such filtering. I also found this quote interesting:

"We have two, three, five changes every week that are visible to the end-user in the user interface. We don't [publicize] the ranking changes. We are making changes to our ranking algorithm at the rate of two per day. Interestingly, some of our competitors haven't made any changes to their ranking function for quite some time. Search needs to evolve: the user interface, the ranking function. It's a process of making lots of small changes all the time and to constantly make things better."

This sounds great, but how is the social interaction affecting the rank? I also found it interesting that she admited that semantic search has its scalability issues and that Google does not focus on it. However, what if semantic search was affected by the social aspect? Ranking based on your friends/followers? The disambiguous results could more easily be identified by filtering based on the users friends/followers/groups/etc. For example, if i typed in "mustangs" to a search engine, it is a very ambiguous query. The results could return Ford Mustangs (the car), P-51 Mustangs (the aircraft), or Mustangs (the horse). I just peformed the query and saw 2 of the 3 displayed on Google. But, filtering results by my social network(s) and associations would and should return Ford Mustangs, not only because I have previously search for ford mustangs, but also because I am connected/associated to other friends/followers/groups that are about or interested in Ford Mustangs? There would certainly be less, if any people I am connected to that are interested in the aircraft or the livestock. That has to be more scalable in an ambiguos world.

Anyway, I am disappointed to see that one could consider the "perfect search engine" and not include anything related to "social search".