Social networking sites have had an explosion in traffic over the last few years. 6% of all internet traffic in the US is contributed by social networking sites (http://www.cio-today.com/news/Facebook-Traffic-More-Than-Doubles/story.xhtml?story_id=10000CBBX1E8&full_skip=1). So with an increase in traffic there is an exponential increase in information in these social networking websites.
Sites such as myspace and facebook started out as places for congregation of internet addicted teenagers. This has now transformed into a platform where people from all age groups and countries keep in touch with friends and communities that they are interested in.
Major search engines such as google, Microsoft Live and Yahoo have ignored indexing and searching social networks. This has led to the evolution of new search engines such as aardvark (vark.com), socialmention, ex.plode.us, search.twitter.com and others.
These search engines offer current relevant information related to the search keyword extracted from live conversations in these social networks. Hence social search is both current and highly relevant.
There is an increasing wealth of information in social networks, which has been ignored by the large players. An efficient way to crawl, index and represent this information will prove to be a disruptive innovation for the search engine industry.
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