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You are at tk here: Search 2.0?

Just the other day, a random thought came to my mind. All that web 2.0 stuff has been really interesting, but not much are really very useful. I remember seeing an Ajax search engine with the "show search terms-as-you-type" feature which I thought was pretty neat (this can be replicated on Google, Yahoo, Msn and some other search engines using an extension in Firefox). Next, commenting popped in my head, with people telling you about their experience on a certain subject matter. Somewhere in between, features from digg interrupted my thoughts, but in a useful way (think of digging). Finally, tagging came along with technorati and last.fm springing up as successful examples of using tags.

Something in my brain clicked and suddenly I had them all linked together. A useful Web 2.0 app was born. By now, you should be able to guess what it is. Search 2.0! I envisioned a search engine that allowed users to tag search results, enter good words on the most relevant search results and curse the evil search engine spammers. Of course it would come standard with Ajax "show search terms-as-you-type" built-in, but before you hit the enter button, it could show you how many people used that search term(s) or how popular that search term(s) was or show you a Google lucky link. Essentially it would try to guess the content you were interested in and show you how many people used those particular search terms and got relevant results or just show you a Google luck link (I hope you know what that means).

After you load your search result page, you could see results sorted in ways other than the search engine algorithm. Logged in users could "digg" results to get them up the search ranking. And like digg, users could "digg" comments as well. For non-relevant/spam results, they could also be reported by users and put in their proper place or taken off the results page. You could then sort results by the default algorithm, "diggs", number of "digged" comments, etc. A result could also be tagged and you could search within certain tags only.

I don't know about you, but all of these sounds very exciting to me and could be a way to entice users from the big G. It would definitely be quite useful to me, and I'm not sure if del.icio.us actally fits that category, since it relies on user submitted urls. This idea of mine actually changes current search engines into a much more robust tool. Hopefully someone reads this and gets enough interest in creating Search 2.0.

ps. I didn't look around much, but has such a search engine appeared on the web?

Update: Google and Microsoft launch betas that are one step closer to Search 2.0, although they really are still very far away from it.

Update: A useful Greasemonkey script that redesigns Google: Google Redux

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