Over the last few years more search engines have caught on to the value of adding a social search component to their marketing mix. What is social search exactly? It’s the idea that people and communities can help improve search relevancy by determining authoritative content to each other and the search engines. Yahoo! has already established a growing social search presence with MyWeb, a place where users can contribute to search by saving, tagging, and sharing out organized, relevant web content.

“The next Evolutionary Step in Search,” according to Google, is Google Co-op. It’s still in its infancy, but with Google Co-op users (experts) have the ability to interact with the search results by specifying which web sites and pages they consider most relevant to a topic, as well as recommend query refinements. The idea is to make search more contextual by allowing users to help define website/web page authority.

With Google Co-op, contributions can be made to current topics, or new topics can be created.

For instance, an automobile mechanic that specializes in a particular type of car can contribute to a topic by annotating web sites and pages she/he feels are most relevant. According to Google there are three ways to contribute to a current topic:

1. “Create a document in either XML format or in tab-delimited format. We have created two Excel templates, one for health and one for destination guides to help you get started.
2. Find URLs of webpages or sites that you want to label.
3. Decide which labels you want to associate with each URL and record that in the file, this is referred to as annotating URLs.”

Creating your own topic provides customized search to users who subscribe to you. This requires you create your own profile first. When users click on your subscribed link, they are taken to a page set up with search refinements, or labels, that you created. These are relevant web sites and pages to a subscriber’s query. The best subscribed links stem from highly targeted keywords and fresh actionable content.

Developing topics and label creation can be a pretty in-depth process. For example, Google offers a number of tips for label creation, such as defining:

• Audience
• Source Type
• Document type
• Subject

Tips with regards to:

• Synonymy
• Polysemy
• Proper punctuation

You can also write topic definition files in XML, which specify which queries will trigger your subscribed links. You can also code advanced label definitions to bring your labeled web pages higher in the search results.

There’s a lot of depth and detail to this system. It definitely tags Google Co-op with a usability factor that’s more complex than other social search engines, such as MyWeb. However, this added depth has its benefits by granting users a huge amount of control over search results. It’ll be interesting to watch Google-Co-op develop.

Check out this Search Engine Roundtable discussion on Google Co-op.