Social search is a tool for finding content shared on social media sites. Social media most commonly refers to the range of sites and tools online which help users to communicate with each other more effectively, share links, content (often photos/video and other non-text media) and make connections with new people. At present most of these tools allow for searching within their tool alone but as their prominence grows various social search engines and tools are developing which allow users to either search for publicly shared trends or aggregate their personal connections across various social media sites and search those.
The trend towards social search continues into the main search engines where they are looking to both include social media results within their main search results (for example Google include their Google+ results in their results pages) but also to include ‘social triggers’ in deciding what other search results to show. The idea that we are likely to be more interested or trust more results that were recommended by our friends is the key factor which is driving the popularity of social search experimentation at present.