Like many, I read Search Engine Land religiously on most days. It’s also a privilege to contribute. This is the third pieces of a series that started with i) Algorithmic search, and ii) Paid search published in Search Engine Watch, and now iii) Social search. I won’t copy the whole thing here, go read it on Search Engine Land – The Impending Social Search Inflection Point

Search has changed. Online consumer information retrieval has reached another inflexion point – a shift from pure algorithmic search to social search. Searchers have become increasingly sophisticated, and basic algorithmic web results are getting diluted out of most mainstream search experiences such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Ask. Search is not solved. At their most sophisticated, users are still too often at a loss when executing a search. According to Jupiter, 41.2 percent of users report that general search results are often not directly relevant to queries, and 18 percent leave a search engine without having found the information they were seeking.

Thanks to the folks at BuzzMetrics for the following chart.

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