Notes from Chris Sherman regarding social search.
The web itself, as created by Tim Berners-Lee, and early things on the web, like the Yahoo! directory, are examples of social search. Links and directories involve human-recommendation systems. HTML meta-tags were another example, but they lasted all of about 2 months before spammers ruined them and search engines were forced to basically ignore them.
He thinks algorithmic search has plateaued and innovations are few and far between.
He gave a great recommendation for My Web as a resource for team projects because various people can save and access content together.
I also liked his mention that although it doesn’t get much airplay these days, the Yahoo! Directory is still going strong and is growing.
Other topics: on Wikipedia, external links are becoming more pervasive. Popurls.com - a helpful tool. Yahoo! Answers - beginning to rank and filter questions by quality.
