In the last two years, the concept of “social” inputs to web search has been heavily promoted. We show that social inputs to search encourage spamming to the point that search quality degrades. These attempts to pollute search are filling the “social” world with junk. An entire ecosystem has come into being to assist with search engine social spamming. Fighting this ecosystem is possible, but not easy.
Full paper: “Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social”.