When I started using the Internet in 1989 (pretty shameful but I was only 13 years old), my social graph was very simple - I had about 10 online friends with whom I shared insightful information on the Holy Grail of the geek Eighties - blue boxing.

Alas, those days are long over now, together with the awful haircuts. My recent count of real-world connections mapped online showed 449 Facebook friends, 305 Linkedin connections and 500 Outlook contacts. Omitting some overlap, I have about 1000 direct connections: friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Now, assuming that each of my connections has about a 100 connections of his own, my implicit network (friends-of-friends) is of a significant size: about 100,000 members.

I have such an amazing network, spread over the entire globe, and all I end up getting is this?

Something is awfully wrong with the way we benefit from our social network today. Our friends and friends-of-friends are continuously creating online content in dozens of social platforms: Myspace, Flickr, Youtube, blogs, etc. However, the high quality and valuable stuff is getting lost in the web 2.0 noise.

Desktop of Techcrunch writer Erick Schonfeld shortly after installing a Twitter client (Web 3.0 Will Be About Reducing the Noise)

That said, even if miraculously you do manage to follow your online connections, what is the true value of most of the content they create? Do you really have the time and attention span to care about what I am doing right now?

On the other hand, when you plan your next spring break in Mexico, I’m sure you’d love to find out that a friend of yours just returned from two months of beach-bumming. Not only he can give you excellent advice - he might also connect you with the right people that will take you to the coolest bars and parties.

This brings us back to the social discovery challenge: How do I filter out the noise and find information that is relevant to me? In order for the wealth of user-generated-content to become valuable, there needs to be a paradigm shift. In the late - 90s, Google’s search engine replaced the inefficient navigation of Yahoo-like indexes; in the “social web” era, we need to move away from the cluttered “social activity feed” concept to Social Search - the ability to efficiently find information that was created or referenced by our social circles.

Social search is very different from web search, since it allows me to find subjective information created or qualified by my network. When I social-search “Sex and the City”, I want to find the reviews of my friends, not the official website of the movie. Result quality is measured by its relevance to me; hence, one of the key ranking factors is the relation of the content author to me.

So, should you watch “Sex and the city”? Google directs us to IMDB, which displays an average user ranking of 5.3/10: 6000 people gave it a rank of 10/10 (not counting my girlfriend, my sister and all their shopping-loving friends) and 6000 people gave ranked it 1/10 (wild speculation: these are the poor boyfriends of the previous group).

The contradicting opinions are pretty confusing, yet a one-line Twitter review from a trusted friend solved the conflict for me:

That’s the great promise of social search: quickly finding relevant information created or referenced by your network. This is Delver’s vision and we are here to make it happen.