social search engine

A social search engine is an enhanced version of a search engine that combines traditional algorithm -driven technology with online community filtering to produce highly personalized results. A few social search engines depend only on online communities. Depending on the feature-set of a particular search engine, these results may then be saved and added to community search results, further improving the relevance of results for future searches of that keyword.

Social search engines are considered a part of Web 2.0 because they use the collective filtering of online communities to elevate particularly interesting or relevant content using tag ging. These descriptive tags add to the meta data embedded in Web pages, theoretically improving the results for particular keywords over time. A user will generally see suggested tags for a particular search term, indicating tags that have previously been added.

Potential drawbacks to social search lie in its open structure, as is the case with other tagged databases. As these are trust-based networks, unintentional or malicious misuse of tags in this context can lead to imprecise search results.

Several different versions of social engines have been launched, including Google Coop, Eurekster, Sproose, Rollyo, Anoox and Yahoo's MyWeb2.0.