This mornings SES2006 session called “Social Search Overview” was pretty interesting as Yahoo explained their view on what authority signals are today and in the future.

I listened especially to Tim Mayer from Yahoo who is the global search director for them. Others on the board were a guy from a blog building company and Nils Pohlmann from Microsoft, leading the Windows Live QnA development.

Tim sees the massive amounts of human generated metadata as the future basis of search results. This metadata is user generated data as on del.icio.us, digg, flickr and other social tagging and classification tools, like e.g. also the Google COOP that I wrote about some time ago. Unfortunately there was no Google guy on the board, but they’ll have a special session dedicated to Coop after lunch.

Tim Mayer talked about the issue of identifying authorities for ranking search results and funnelling traffic to the right places – and clearly pointed out that the meta data creating tagging services available are the future of search.

The historical development of authority signals for websites as seen from Yahoo is

1. hand edited yahoo directory – some 90’s job and Yahoo editors only edited their directory
2. later Google introduced the PageRank and built an automated algorithm to rank pages based on the links and anchors set by webmasters

1. Then there came Social Tagging – tools like del.icio.us delivering metadata in an even more formal way, not only created by webmasters, but by users – therefore an exponentially bigger amount of signals for search engines and other systems once they mine that data a) urls are listed just like the HREFs in normal text links and b) the tags assigned perform a directory-like classification – just from so many editors more (people using the tagging service) – and ANYONE can use a tagging service, or?

So down to earth – getting cited in social metadata like Google answers, yahoo answers, myweb, del.icio.us will give an authority boost – either today or tomorrow! So Prepare!

Yahoo’s social search strategy points out clear goals to

• reach critical mass of human generated classification data

• use and extend those social tools like Yahoo Answers, Yahoo myWeb, Del.icio.us, Flickr

Additionally, also just today Yahoo announced the new product at builder.search.yahoo.com that let’s you build customized searches…

Actually that tool reminds me very much like the Google custom search that’s out there for some time already, but Yahoo’S tool is so much nicer, very AJAXed and also allows you to narrow your search to some news channels and a time span.

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