The argument being that Google is loosing the war against spam. A new and better Google will likely be Google itself. What we really need is a way to discover content that's not search.
For many things there is utility to social content finding. Sites like HN work for news/discussion, and Twitter and Facebook work for a random amalgam of things. I'm interested in the future of social search startups that somehow curate content from friends. In the articles example- asking friends if they liked their Dishwasher, and if yes what brand it is. That's the most like how people IRL make these decisions. I know there are some startups in this space as well, hope they do well!
Having just bought a new washer and dryer I can honestly say that my friends opinions were not a factor in the decision at all even though we did speak about it before I made the purchase. The main reason being other than some superficial elements of the appliances my friends can't really speak intelligently about their own appliances. They tend to not remember beyond the initial purchase point what many of the features even are. For example I asked a friend if his washer contained a heater and while it does he didn't even have a clue that it did.
I have a relative working at Home Depot and we just discussed this topic at length given my own recent purchase. Most of their appliance customers come in with some idea of how much money they want to spend and what basic feature set they would like. Then they are looking for a knowledgeable sales associate to explain to them the differences and benefits of the various models. They may have "heard from a friend" that a particular model was good or a particular feature was good but even that information is usually incomplete or incorrect. I would fully expect "social" results for these types of queries to result in even more misinformation.
Google did try this. I don't think it ever left the lab, but I used it for a while. I think they may have canned it; I just realized I haven't seen it in a while. It was called searchwiki. I think it was originally just supposed to apply to your own results, but I'm sure they analyzed the tendencies to see if it would've helful to use overall.
Honestly, such a system would be ridiculously easy to game with a botnet, so there needs to be significant work in the area beforehand.
I think the 'X" was live for maybe a month or two. I figured either or both that there was a resource/algorithm problem that prevented them from continuing in a fruitful way, or that it was a bit of user survey they could use in aggregate as preference weighting on the indexes/results. That is, not as a function of personal filtering, but to see if there were commonalities in what people considered to be bad sites. This may be further supported by the fact that the lifetime of the feature may have been too short for gamers to exploit it.
The problem with that, is again, spam. How do you differentiate fake votes from real ones? You can do per-IP limiting, and probably other things I'm not aware of (please comment about them), but it's still pretty open to abuse I'd say.
Google has proven to be very effective data collectors (see "What they know" stuff from WSJ e.g. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870330970457541...) - it may on the one hand be surprising they don't use this data more effectively to identify and thwart spam. OTOH, they're making a lot of money on spammy SERPs.
I'd even be OK with "Thumbs Up/Down this result just for your own personal book-keeping", so that you can promote/demote results in your own search history (try searching for "_____ tutorial photoshop" and you'll get tons of splog links before you eventually hit a golden result. It'd be nice to save time later).
Google briefly had a feature like this in their results, but they've removed it. All that's left is the Star system, which isn't quite the same.
How would it be possible to discover content without searching? If I want to discover content about something I have to tell the computer what that something is about, that would be searching. If you are talking about directories, then I wouldn't use that.
