Okay, let me give you a scenario. You come home from a long day at work, and you just finish eating dinner. You turn on American Idol for some background noise in your home. I understand...it's a bit eerie when it's silent. You hop onto your laptop and open up the World Wide Web (oh, it sounds so archaic). You either go to Yahoo or Google to see what's new. Then, all of a sudden, you don't know where to go next....

Am I the only one in the world that runs out of things to look at on the web. My pattern of usage is Yahoo for general news, CNN for hard core news, Seattle Times for local news...then the national headline stuff gets over-repeated on all the sources. After these 3 sites, I hit this brick wall. It's the brick wall of "what else should I search for?" Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but I actually run out of things to look for.

So, what would life be like if we added social features into search. For example, what if I could search for everything that my buddy Steve searched for? I know what you're thinking. You probably don't want to know everything that Steve searched for. After all, search is private, right?

Well, it depends. I think this type of search based on your social graph or friends could be interesting and very useful in some vertical categories. For example, wouldn't it be interesting to find out all the books that your friends found on the web. Wouldn't it be interesting to find out all the "good travel deals" your friends found as well. How about great restaurants or hang outs?

Social search could be very interesting. In fact, there are some sites that help you find things that your friends found interesting. If you really think about Google's page rank...it is a little bit of search based on what others thought of the page through the quality of links.

Well, we've been discussing this topic at Zoodango quite a bit. In fact, we are already working on some interesting technology that will help you search based on your social context. But not only social context, but also answering social lifestyle questions.....like "I'm sad, what should I do today" or "I want to hang out with Steve, what and where should we go?" Search can go beyond the web. Search can be multidimensional in our lives. The reality is that we are always searching...even in our sleep.