Some time ago the Social Search Engines have been growing up from small startups companies. Based on the concept of collaboration, this search engines provide users with different ways of changing their search results:

Voting up or down the results

Users may can to vote up or down the results of their search, so this votes can be used for future searches for other users.

Commenting the results

Post a comment to a given result depending on the user opinion or knowledge on this. The comments can be used as an extended snippet for the result.

The Social Search Engines are Rich Internet Application developed under the Web 2.0 philosophy and using Ajax as platform for developement.

Scour was the first Social Search Engine I used. It provides the posibility to search through the 3 most popular Search Engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN. And configure the weight of every search engine on your final results. Scour also have a promotion system based on points convertible into real money through your and your friends searches.

Now Google Experimental Search enable Google users to comment, vote, change the position rank or delete a record on our search.

Will the Social Search Engines change the way we search the web?

Sure it will do, we’ve been trained to use the social generated content, we started with mailing lists to go through forums and groups, we have seen growing the Wikipedia and keep the social phenomena growing to the social networks where all content is user generated.

The social search engines will success when the user get concerned about the relevance of the vote or the comment he is making.

The pagerank will not depend on some variables that can be “hacked”, it will be determined by users to users.

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