NAOMS · building block
Social search
Find the right person or answer through the people you trust. Matchmaking is one example.
Social search routes a query through a person’s own trust network instead of a public index. Matchmaking is the clearest example: people write description-first profile entries (needs, offers, wants, gifts, goals, quests), and a structured engine and a semantic engine each score how well two entries fit, then combine the scores. The same trust-scoped propagation, hop by hop, works for any query that should stay inside a trust boundary.
What a person notices
- Asking “who can help me with this” surfaces someone from the person’s actual network, not strangers ranked by a hidden algorithm.
- A search only shows as much of someone’s profile as that person chose to share at that trust level.
- Matches don’t connect two people automatically. Both sides still decide.
What you get as a developer
Social search routes a query through a person’s trust network instead of a public index. Matchmaking, description-first profile matching for what people need, offer, want and are working toward, is the clearest example, but the same trust-scoped propagation is a general mechanism.
- Matching is description-first: a person writes what they need, offer, want, or are working toward, and a structured engine and a semantic (meaning-based) engine both score how well two entries fit, then combine the scores.
- Queries propagate outward through the trust graph itself, hop by hop. Each hop only forwards to contacts whose trust flow clears a threshold set on the query, and people in between see only a compact filter, not the actual description.
- Six category pairs (needs and offers, wants and gifts, goals and goals, quests and quests) define what is allowed to match what, so a want is never silently matched against an unrelated need.
- A match becomes a proposal once it clears a score threshold, and the recipient can accept or decline it; nothing links two people automatically without that step.
- The same trust-scoped propagation isn’t limited to matchmaking. Any query that should only travel as far as trust reaches, a request for help, a question only certain people should see, can use the same path.