What is social search? Social search is a form of search where the public get to affect the search results. This is done in the form of votes. With sites such as digg.com you can vote (or digg) for a story that you think is good. The more diggs a story has the higher it will appear in the news listings for that category. Other sites such as del.icio.us (which was bought over by Yahoo last year) use social bookmarking to power their search engine. When you sign up for a del.icio.us account you put an "add to del.icio.us" bookmark in your favourites. Then when you are on a site that you like you can add it to del.icio.us as one of your favourites. These favourites count as votes for that site. The more votes a site gets from different accounts the better that site will perform in a del.icio.us search.
Google co-op seems to be a way of using social search to help improve organic search listings. It offers a way in which you can "subscribe" to a site via Google Co-op, and these subscriptions are counted up for that site. Theoretically, these numbers will help a site get an edge on competitor sites with regards Google's SERPs. At the moment Google Co-op's 'directory' of sites that you can subscribe to is relatively small. This directory has only four sections - health, information, news, and travel; and is a work in progress at the moment.
While still very small, Google co-op has the potential to be an enormous change in how search is approached and could be a very useful tool, or dataset input, for the search engine. It is not thought that Google has yet tied Co-op to how Google will rank a site in the pure organic results, but if this venture is successful it could shape how Google provides its search results in the future.
The downside of Google using Co-op to affect its organic rankings is that it will be easy for spammers to open many accounts and use these accounts to promote their websites, so skewing Google's results. This will leave Google's search results less under its control and more under the search spammers' control. This could potentially water down the relevancy of Google's SERPs.
These revelations are a big move for Google, and could be very influential in the world of search. Whether it becomes the case that Google takes another giant leap ahead of the competition, or that Google slips up and takes a wrong turn at a (social) fork in the road, and loses its strong market domination. This is one to watch.
