Aardvark is a search engine founded by ex-Googlers, that uses social network power. It is not based on information created by users and than indexed. It is distributing the query among your afiliates and their afiliates, who find themselves good at different fields - if you’re lucky you might get the answer. Idea is not stupid, or rather decent. User can ’search’ by using IM, e-mail, SMS or Twitter.

To increase probability of being answered you should take care and gather as much friends in the service as possible, which is a little bit hard especially at the begging after releasing public beta version. But there is an option to grab the contact list from Facebook connect.

After typing in the query the algorhytm searches for person that is most probable to have knowledge about what user is aksing. Than user just have to wait for the answer. Basis for poining on specific user as the one who has appropriate knowledge is the fact that he introduced himself as having knowledge on particular field, coming from specific region or interested in something user asked about.

It looks like this sort of human powered search is one with completely new approach. It is interesting how many degrees of affiliation can be potentially used. However it can be a great source of help and really practicl information in some cases. Except for that Aardvark looks like it is going to be not only the source of information but also sort of place to make friends and have fun.

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Sweetsearch is a extraordinary search engine due to whole process of indexing instead of being automatically conducted by crawler is done by humans with their hands, we can say. This procedure’s aim is to provide results of highest quality and selectivity level. Each site has been marked by a team of Internet researchers (from Dulcinea.com)by the angle of content, quality and reliability.

The only advatange that this sort of Web search has in my opinion is the fact that we do not get search spam in the results. We can be sure that we will find only serious sites among our results. But on the other hand there are many doubts like: is index also created by humans?, are these “Internet researchers” competent in each field?. Human powered search is a new trend by rather at community level. Such a solution crosses out whole idea of democratic rules in the search business.

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Topicle is a search engine that connects concept of vertical search with social search. Registered users contribute by adding websites to created categories that from than are searchable by Topicle. It also contains some element of personalised search - process of adding new category is named “creating engine”. It is about adding few URL that are found to be most relevant to the category.

All created search engines/categories are editable by all users, so outcome of work of different members of community can turn out efficient and relevant. Naturally this kind of search is built on trust so it adds some risk of time waste to its use, especially in business search, but on the other hand we can count that there is somebody thinking exactly like ourselves so this choice might turn out to be success.

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When one faces the deluge of information one of most important issues becomes the fact of credibility of information we get from the Web. There are methods of setting the track record for particular websites (based on monitoring the site’s credibility), but there’s no guarantee that the site we find trustworthy would be among the results for particular query. Answer and remedium for this problem, can be Google Wiki Search, that enables to mark up specific site (for example the one we consider to be a good source of information). This site would be always at the top of search results site, when we search for terms that can be boiled up to the same category (for example try financial crisis and credit crisis).

In this case we can observe completetly new approach - giving credibility status with web tools is individualized, previously there were start-ups basing on social suggestions, Eurekster or Mahlo, just to give examples. But in this case we were forced to trust the community - which in fact remained anonymous. These services are not closed, opened social services that gather opinions from enthusiasts who, in many cases, lack the elementary knowledge in specialized disciplines, like for examples economy, medicine or others. On the one hand - it is the silent bauty of Web 2.0 - every amteur can become an expert, but on the other hand during searching the Web to get the information essential to your company or research it can just complicate things and waste our time.

Trust if of course the basis of each society (at least these highly developed ones), but wasn’t the web since it beginning a meritocratic phenomenon? I do not claim that democratization of Web is something wrong, it is good, it enhances the flow of opinions and provides another areas of potential business-making but… user-generated content affects the web credibility. In the field of retrieving credible information, that can determine the success of our venture or our client’s venture it seems that it is better to trust competent people. Social marked search results can be useful just for preparing the popularity ranks among particular web communities and at a pinch to get the opinion of web users.

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Google launched Search Wiki option, I wrote about that was in experimentary phase. Now after changing your set language to English you can use this option. It enables us to mark up specific search results to the top or remove them if we found them not valuable. We can also add comments to particular results.

What is most important, effects of our customization are available only for us, so de facto we can set our own credibility rank, based only on our needs and experience. However SearchWiki contains some social aspect. First and foremost we can share our comments by making them public and contributing to the community. Second, we can browse rank, created on basis of all users activities connected with particular query - we can also add results that we find are useful.

Is it the end of so-called black SEO? Spread of Search Wiki can enable people not to see price comparators sites or sites that were artificially pulled out to the top in the results, that means we can get the information we want quicker. At the same time the changes are visible only when we are logged in to Google, so ‘fake’ results will still be visible for all non-Googlers and these who at the moment would not be logged in. Probably black SEO will be still practiced, although its influence on popularity of pulled out sites can be significant.

Google’s video, presenting how Search Wiki works:

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