There's a big battle a'brewing in the online search sector (check this video), as new human-powered "social search" networks are rising up against the machines (meaning Google/Yahoo!/Ask/Live/etc.). I recently wrote about the neo-natal state of Jimmy Wales' new search venture, Wikia Search, and gave my assessment that it shows great potential but there is still a lot of work to do before it can be a real competitor to the bot-powered behemoths like Google and Yahoo! (not to mention Microsoft's Live search). Since then I've also been testing out Jason Calacanis' people-powered search site, Mahalo.

The main difference between Wikia and Mahalo is that Wikia's results are culled by volunteers, whereas Mahalo's "editors" are paid to assemble search results by hand based on user requests. In essence, the Mahalo model is very enterprising. Mahalo has a program called the Mahalo Greenhouse which acts as a sort of brokerage for getting top-requested search-results pages built by its members. Topics that need results pages built are listed by vertical teams, such as Geography, and each team has a list of pages that need building with a price that will be paid for creation of that page, ranked by priority (and presumably based on popularity). So to use the Geography list as an example, there are roughly 50 countries on the "Most Wanted List", for which "Serbia" will net you $12 but "Angola" will only get you $10. Other search terms may pay as little as $1, but hey, it beats working for free (which is Wikia's model).

So how do these social search engines fare when compared to the algorithm-based engines? Well, honestly they have a lot of work to do, but they definitely show promise. The biggest advantage is that every link has supposedly been verified and vetted by an actual human. This should weed out the spam-link sites or otherwise unrelated results that can pollute a machine-compiled results page. For example, a search for the term "paris hilton" reveals some interesting differences. I chose this term specifically because it could mean more than one thing. I could be searching for a Hilton hotel in Paris, or I could be searching for info on the celebrity. I don't expect the search engine to know which one I meant, so the results could go either way.

So let's see how the humans fared vs the algorithms...   read more »

Not to be outdone by the Facebook/Microsoft partnership that's been slowly but surely forming, Google has just launched a new social network applicaton framework called OpenSocial, and the first big player to sign up is none other than the number 1 social network (in terms of unique visitors) MySpace. Other sites jumping on Google's bandwagon include Bebo, LinkedIn, and of course Orkut which is Google's own social network that is really big in Latin America and Asia but nowhere else for some reason.

OpenSocial seeks to do for other social networking sites what the Facebook Platform has done for Facebook: create an ecology of 3rd party applications that tie in to the social network through API's to enable expanded functionality (either useful or playful) beyond the core suite of tools, and at the same time providing a new outlet to embed Google ads. Pretty clever concept to make it a somewhat universal platform, and it will be interesting to see if it has the same impact that Facebook has had on the web development community.