John Battell says it best: Search is no longer a stand-alone application, a useful but impersonal tool for finding something on a new medium called the world wide web. Increasingly, search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world, and our place within it. It’s how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge.
And he should be able to say it pretty good by now, cause he has been working on his book about the search industry for years now. Seriously John, I need this book!
Today I think Yahoo has taken us a step closer to realizing what John was talking about above.
It’s called My Web 2.0. The new feature is MyRank. It’s an entirely different method of deciding page rankings. Instead of a site getting a high ranking from links, the rank will be determined by a different algorithm based on social inputs such as your group, your search history, and your own personally tagged webspace. Essentially it becomes your own personalized search engine.
Yahoo has a better discrption on its blog (of course), so take a look and see for yourself. They just might be the first search engine to really harness the power of small search groups.