Yahoo’s experiment with social search, Yahoo 360 MyWeb, never took off. is being shut down. It was a rudimentary social search in that relevant bookmarks from friends showed up as search results. And search has never been Facebook’s strong suit. It handed search over to Microsoft, but the search experience on the site is poor. It is difficult to search much deeper than your friends’ names. You need to go to an advanced profile search page to filter through their interests, activities, or other profile categories, for instance. And forget about searching your news feed.

Yet social search done right could become very valuable for Facebook. And it would be even more valuable for Google. (They already know how to make money from search). It is also an opportunity for Microsoft Live Search, but they are not really inspiring much confidence so far. So let’s set aside for a moment the unlikelihood of any Google-Facebook deal or partnership (given Microsoft’s investment in Facebook), and let’s imagine how the two could help each other.

Even if Facebook/Microsoft figures out social search, it is more useful on Google, which is where most of us do our searching. To get a glimpse at what this might look like, you can try Sidestripe, which is both an add-on widget for Google search and a Facebook app. Sidestripe is like Glue for search (Glue is a browser add-on that shows you whether anyone in your social networks has expressed interest in the book, movie, restaurant, product, or other things mentioned on whatever page you happen to be browsing). Similarly, sidestripe indexes all your friends on Facebook and parts of their profiles (where they work, their interests, etc). When you do a search on Google, a box with Sidestripe results appears after the third natural result, giving you a sense of whether any of your friends might be experts on the topic. For instance, when I do a search for “Google” it turns up Facebook friends who work at Google or are somehow affiliated with Google, and looks like this:

A search for “biking” turns up friends who are interested in biking. You can also add your own knowledge to any search result, and it will appear as a subsequent result (although it does not let you add links, which I consider a major bug). Or if you still can’t find what you are looking for from either Google or Sidestripe, you can ask all of your friends a question from inside the Sidestripe box on Google about the topic you are trying to learn about and that question shows up in all of your friends’ feeds. Any answers then become indexed and searchable.

Sidestripe is barely out of alpha and still frustrating to use because more often than not the Sidestripe box remains empty. When there are results, they are interesting. It is hit or miss. As more people use Sidestripe, this should improve. But I think a big part of the problem is that it does not fully index my social graph, and certainly does not return results from my News feed.

Yet making Facebook’s News feed searchable (on Google) would go a long way towards realizing the dream of social search. The Facebook feed already aggregates what my friends are doing not just on Facebook but all across the Web (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc.). It’s like Friendfeed in this respect, but with many more users.

The trick to making all of this seemingly random data useful in search is to come up with a social algorithm that can rank it all accordingly. For instance, when I search for Florence, Italy, friends who have lived in Florence, Italy should show up, but so should friends who have recently taken pictures there or Tweeted about Florence, and maybe in that order. This kind of ranking is a hard problem to solve, and it is what Google is good at.

Imagine instead of Sidestripe, the option to add Facebook Connect to Google search, which would then turn on social search in results (these should only appear when there actually are social results to show). They could keep the Q&A capability in there as well. It would add an entirely new dimension to search.

Of course, Google has its own Friend Connect program, and wants to monetize it with Friendsense. But just as search is not Facebook’s strong suit, social networking isn’t Google’s. All my contacts are on Facebook. They are the ones I want to search. And everything I’ve described above is a big opportunity for Microsoft, if they can pull it off.

But the best results, IMHO, would come form a combination of Facebook and Google.

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Blue Organizer rolled out a series of substantial feature upgrades this week as well; I reviewed the previous version of the product  here in November.

Adaptive Blue is a four person company that was founded one year ago and had been self funded by founder Alex Iskold.  The company’s big break came when the Blue Organizer was selected as an official recommendation on the Firefox 2.0 add-ons page.  User downloads grew from 20k prior to that listing to 130k in November to 340k today.  It’s interesting to see that growth rate has continued since the release of the latest Firefox version.

To get a good idea of Blue Organizer’s power, I recommend either trying the browser plug-in out or reading my previous review of it.  Below is a screenshot to give you a taste of what it looks like when I was on a web page containing a music review and used Blue Organizer.  The product automatically determined that I was reading about music and what search options would be most relevant.   It’s very impressive, but my personal use of the web is focused enough on one topic that it’s topic discerning powers and vertical search are less relevant to me than they might be for more casual web users who read online about things like wine and books.

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The newest version of the product introduces the Blue Menu, a contextual menu of search and tagging options that appears on right-click and is determined on the fly by a semantic analysis of the page you are on.

In other words, if I’m on a web page about a movie I can right click and the Blue Menu will offer to let me search for that movie’s title, for its stars and director and for movies in the same genre in movie related databases. It will let me compare prices for the movie in shopping search engines and with one click I can send that movie to my Netflix queue.

If I’m on a page about a wine and right click, the Blue Menu will offer to let me search for wines by winery, type of wine, geographic location and ingredients in other sites about wine. A music item can be launched in Pandora.

Blue Organizer recognizes items from a list of other verticals too including travel, toys, anime, software, hardware, restaurants, music, images and video. It’s an impressive tool. Each vertical has some default search options, but users can easily select other ones or make requests for still other databases to be included. In future versions of the software there will be a wizard that will let users easily add new search options themselves.

Adaptive Blue has already programmed against hundreds of popular sites in these verticals, but the tool is also quite good at determining context of new sites. With reasonable accuracy, for example, I can highlight the title of a movie in a news story on a news site about that movie and the Blue Menu will recognize it as a movie. It will also let me search for other movies the director has directed or the stars have starred in even if those names are not listed in the news article. Very impressive when it works and it does work fairly often. (See screen shot above, for example.)

In addition to all these exciting search options there’s also bookmarking options. Standard tags are recommended based on semantic analysis of the text but tag choices are ultimately up to users. Pages are automatically bookmarked after you visit them 3 times, but that number can be changed or deselected entirely. In future versions subscription to topics will be offered as well and will be organized in a similar semantic fashion. There’s quite a bit more to the product, but the contextual search menu on right click is the most important new feature.

Today is the new product’s first day in the wild and there are any number of kinks that need to be worked out. Adaptive Blue is a startup with a lot of momentum though. It was recently named one of the Firefox recommended add-ons list when Firefox 2.0 was released and has had more than 130k downloads. Unlike many social bookmarking services – it’s already generating revenue from companies that are paying to have themselves included in the default options of the contextual search and related parts of Blue Organizer. Purchases of bookmarked items through Blue Organizer go through affiliate links as well.

I’ll have to give it some more use to see just how useful and capable this new version of Blue Organizer is, but I’m guessing that many people are going to find if very useful. There is an option to sync your bookmarks in Blue Organizer with your Del.icio.us and Flickr accounts, which is great because you can try it out for awhile without risking the loss of what you bookmark if you decide you want to go back to Del.icio.us.

One of the best things about it is that there is so much than can be done with this tool, and yet using it is remarkably simple. There is a good degree of customization and advanced use that’s possible, but relatively thoughtless use will still provide substantial value to users. Fun for early adopters and mainstream users. That’s one important mark of a good product.

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