Using social media for Search

News aggregation sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit are suppossed to make our lives simpler. With other folk sifting through the billions of pages to help us find what is relevant to me and my niche and vise-versa.

I have for example started using Del.cio.us as my primary search tool over Google. The Google agolorhtymn still doesnt know exactly what is of real value to my search but my peers do. However if my interests weren’t geeky 2.0 and social media I’m not sure it would still be such an effective tool perhaps Stumbleupon may be more relevant but it’s still quite US focused. You can create Google custom searches but you still have to know where you want to look its just a time saver. 

The value of using Digg and it’s homepage has long been eroded in my eyes not just by the fact that I generally don’t find anything interesting there but if you look at the last 500 front page stories on Digg, the top 10 submitters dominated stories by 31% (157 out of 500). Check out this story for more (thanks JD Rucker).

A clever chap has created a wee experiment to open up these networks called Newsfied that take us deeper beyond the homepages. Maybe this is just the key that was needed. But to me Digg, Redit and most others largely remain irrelevant but In guess that’s because I am not really connected into them yet.

It goes back to ‘The more you put in the more you get back’.