There is no end to the hype around social search. As far back as four or five years ago, buzz in the search community around social search was high, with predictions of game-changing search methods that overrule the algorithmic search of the tier one players, replacing it with user-generated rankings that ensure quality of results and downplay companies’ ability to game the system.

Even with all the buzz around major social search engines like Eurekster, Prefound, iRazoo, Wikia and probably most notably (or notoriously) Mahalo, the social search market share is infinitesimally small. And while leaders in the space like Danny Sullivan start talking about Search 4.0 and bringing a social aspect back into the world of search, the cold hard truth is that it just hasn’t caught on yet. But why?

Some engines (Prefound for example) were way ahead of the game, and tried to launch social search before things really started getting “social” online. Others, like Eurekster, encountered problems with adoption because they only supported a narrow vertical market, which in Eurekster’s case involved providing a service to search individual sites, not an engine that could accomplish internet search on the broader scale. You have engines like iRazoo that provide user-generated recommendations for sites, coupled with monetary incentive to search, trying to use the draw of prizes to gain market share. Then you have engines like Wikia, that rely heavily on generating a user-base before search results will start to have any quality at all. Finally, you have engines like Mahalo that suffer seriously from scalability issues, forcing them to literally hire search editors to provide rankings of sites in order to deliver results, thereby defeating the social aspect (what would you say if Facebook was generating fake profiles to fill its ranks until some real friends came along?!)

All in all, social search has been through some rough times. Despite this fact, the major three engines still talk about social search as part of their vision for the future, and Calacanis continues to champion the social search space despite his need for 460 editors on call 24 hours a day to make the “user-generated” site work. So where is social search heading? What do we need to make a truly scalable, user-friendly, reliable social search engine with the capacity to break into the mainstream market? The answer, we believe, lies in a combination of many of the things engines have tried along the way, coupled with a successful integration with results from the top three engines as well and the adoption of other social components that are already successfully in use today. Some of these components include:

-Voting on relevancy of search results fashioned to match the voting process at the already-popular Digg site.

-Comments fields similar to those already in use on sites like Facebook and YouTube, enabling users to comment on results as easily as they add comments to pictures and videos.

-Integration of friend community to the search world, enabling users to share search results quickly and easily, recommend sites they find while searching, and share recent searches with the community.

-Adoption of incentive programs that are easy to use, and are based on community members and referrals/invitations, providing added impetus for searches to bring friends and family into the fold.

These ideas represent just a few of the ways the idea of community will begin to move into the search world. Will a Google-killer arrive on the scene imminently and take major market share away from the search giants? Unlikely. But that doesn’t mean that social search isn’t the future. It simply means that new ideas and new ways of using the social components already in use must be integrated in such a way as to spur greater adoption and provide added incentive to break the Google habit.

-Daniel Yomtobian, CEO