In the mid 1990s, Yahoo, the first popular Web portal, guided most Internet traffic with a simple hand-picked menu of sites. Yahoo's editors decided which Web sites were worth pointing to, and that's where the traffic went. At the time, it seemed like a good system, and much more efficient than search engines, which tended to spit out mountains of irrelevant results. Back then, it sometimes seemed easier to find a needle in a haystack than to find anything with a search engine.
Then Google built a better mousetrap. Instead of relying on humans to figure out which content is best, Google's computers determined relevance and authority. Google's PageRank system considers not only the words contained on a Web page, but also how many related sites link in. Each incoming link is a vote on a page's importance, helping it rise to the top of Google's search results.
As good as Google's system is, however, it can't always deliver relevant results, particularly for specialized content. Sometimes providing good search results requires direct human brainpower, something provided by social search tools. Social search works best in deep niches, where people who truly understand the content render judgments. In these cases, social search can be more accurate than Google's algorithmic search, which counts links only.
Why should authors care about social search? Because more and more people are using it to find the exact content they want.
Here's what can happen if your book's Web site or blog is mentioned favorably on a social search service--a flood of 5,000 to 10,000 visitors can come to your site within hours. This crowd can include thousands of folks highly passionate about your topic, and those nearly impossible to reach through traditional advertising or publicity.
Dozens of popular sites have emerged in the past few years providing tools for search, social networking, and social bookmarking: