How can social search be improved? By maintaining a standardized, publicly accessible database of of the information and knowledge in people’s heads, and creating an easy way to access that information. In other words, a personal API. *

Damon Horowitz on the Aardvark company blog, The Real-Time People Web, discussing search and the web of people and information:

What really matters is the increased accessibility of people online, not just information online.

… This becomes pretty compelling if we remember that the amount of information in peoples’ heads positively dwarfs the amount of authored information online: just think what a small fraction of everything you know you have published on the web. Yet everyone (not just those who blog a lot) have knowledge and experience that is valuable to share. By using the web as an index of people, Social Search lets you tap into absolutely anything that anyone knows… in the theoretical limit.

First off: I’ll use a simplistic assumption of social search as querying people and web search as querying stores of information, and ignore the finer difference between the searching the ocean (Google) and searching the river (Twitter).

Fact is, the different methods of search are complements rather than replacements, different ways to find information and knowledge that vary in their levels of success across different use cases.

Timeliness and Relevance
The primary trade-off between web search and social search is between timeliness and relevance.

Social search delivers better relevance (context tied specifically to your needs, delivered in response to exact questions), but may be more expensive to access.

Why? Because routing social search requests takes time, varies by the quantity and quality of one’s social network and involves a bit of trial-and-error. Imagine asking a bunch of friends, sequentially, for a recommendation or an answer to a question. Learning who, how and when to approach for different questions takes time. How do we reduce the time necessary to match up questions with answers?

Accessing the stores of information in our heads
VRM and personal APIs offer two sides of the coin to reduce the time in the exchange and match giver and receiver of information.

Think of VRM as a standing RFP (request for proposal) for what you want, a way for you to make a public, easily available request to everyone for what you want, without having to create and route a request every time.

On the flip side, a personal API is a way for you to tell the world what you have, and set the rules for accessing what you have as easily and cheaply as possible.

The routing engine
Social search, therefore, is the bridge in-between, the routing engine that matches up givers and takers, buyers and sellers, matching contexts and delivering content.

Where is this particularly valuable? In areas where information is opaque, specialized, or highly contextual: information that only a few possess, is not readily publicly available, is expensive to access or use, or hasn’t been translated for a specific context, industry or use case.

Why? Because publishing a personal API available for people to search provides an easier way to search and access the stores of data in people’s head.

Where do we see this showing up in our lives today? To start, Aardvark, the variety of VRM-inspired projects, the Data Portability project, Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Latitude; all examples of how making data about our lives available in public, structured stores of information can improve our lives. We’ll see the impact in our online lives first, but we’ll soon many more examples in our offline lives.

How will we see the idea show up more in our personal lives? That’s the biggest thought question in my mind.

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* Thank you for indulging a bit of unstructured thinking-out-loud. Yes, I know “personal APIs” is an odd term, I’m open to better ideas.
** Related discussion between Ethan Bauley and Daniel Tunkelang about social shopping and Aardvark.
*** Also related, Personal APIs: Better Living Through Collaboration.