The most aggressive and devastating challenge to Google’s search dominance might come from a social network, specially given the fact that they already have a multi-million strong loyal user base. Having said this, it seems that business social network LinkedIn might already be upto this, as it has upgraded its search features to include search suggestions for querying contacts, streamlined search results, modified search, customized view – a feature that displays the contacts in the users network on top of search results. In addition to this the users could also save their searches for later viewing. LinkedIn is already experiencing tremendous uptake due to immense lay offs.
I think they are still far off from being a threat to google. However, it does make social searching much more interesting and advanced (it’s about time). I wonder how this will effect sites like http://www.yoname.com that search the social networks.
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