Google Launches Google Co-op

Recently Google launched Google Co-op, the company's foray into social search. Co-op allows people to act as web guides, marking their favorite web sites in different topic areas, and then sharing them with friends. Subscribe to your friends' links and they will appear in the supplemental search results for relevant searches.

The idea is that web sites rated highly by trusted friends deserve more prominent placement.

The term "friends" is loosely defined and can be organizations or businesses that you consider to be subject matter experts. Subscribe to Frommer.s Travel Guides, then search for "London" and you'll see links for Lodging Guides and Suggested Itineraries above the organic search results.

This has obvious potential for businesses, especially those with customer loyalty programs.

But the big question is whether Co-op will become a new way to identify authority web sites and thereby boost them in organic search results, much the way that Yahoo wants to use social tagging and "the wisdom of crowds" to influence its search results.

My bet is that the Co-op is simply a way for Google to hedge its bets in case social tagging takes off, and that Google is far less committed to the concept of social search.

Yahoo and Google have vastly different DNA. Yahoo began as a human-edited web directory, abandoning that approach only when it failed to keep up with the growth of the web.

Social search lets Yahoo return to its roots as a web directory. Indeed, one way to look at social search is as an infinitely scaleable web directory with thousands of volunteer web guides.

Google bet on the wisdom of crowds years ago when it introduced PageRank, its system for identifying authority web sites based on links from other sites. But Google has learned that PageRank can be spammed by artificial links. Since then Google has sought other ways to identify quality sites, such as traffic data gathered through Google Toolbar.

Can social search be spammed? You can bet a lot of people will try.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of the Search Marketing Standard magazine.