AZ Central has a great article on the growing popularity of “social search” engines that are created and edited by human users instead of computer algorithms and spiders. Many people believe that these social search engines return more relevant search results because they are edited by human users instead of ranking algorithms.

From the article –

Traditional search results are largely based on objective criteria such as counting the number of links other sites have placed to a given Web page. Social search gives people subjective answers – the best sushi restaurant in Chicago or the best Web site for information about French Impressionism – not necessarily the site visited the most.

“You’re essentially breaking up a problem and sending it out to a huge number of people for a query, getting answers back,” said Steven Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It kind of ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. Other people are going to make associations and connections to information you probably would not have made.”

At Prefound, launched earlier this year, users contribute to the knowledge pool by submitting clusters of sites they believe would appeal to like-minded people.

A visitor looking for information on, say, New Jersey beaches can get the user-recommended sites, grouped by users. One user’s cluster gives restaurants, Internet cafes and other information on the coastal town of Ventnor City, N.J.

Results are better the more people contribute sites.

Jones said it’s too early to know whether social search will dramatically change the way people look for information on the Internet, but it’s already changing the way traditional search companies do business.

Yahoo, a distant second to Google, has entered the game largely by buying some of these start-ups, namely Del.icio.us, a system for discovering new sites based on shared bookmarks, and Flickr, a photo-sharing sites where users tag items with keywords to help friends and strangers alike discover photographs on any topic.

Google has started to incorporate community answers on travel and health questions into its main search engine. It has also established a program allowing users to contribute their own content, tagged with specific attributes, to turn up in search results.

You can read the entire article @ ‘Social search’ engines put human touch on info.

Web billionaire Mark Cuban is advising parents on how to better research what their children do with their MySpace accounts and other online activities.

From a recent Forbes article –

Entrepreneur Mark Cuban has something to say about everything. So as the parent of a young’un, it stands to reason he’s got some opinions on that obsession of youth, MySpace.

The Internet billionaire, who made his fortune in 1999 by selling his streaming firm Broadcast.com to Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO – news – people ), recently weighed in on the social networking Web site now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (nyse: NWS – news – people ).

On his blog, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks noted that his little girl is a mere 2.5 year-old stripling: “Not old enough, yet, to have a MySpace page. Not quite anyway.” But some of his friends have offspring within range, and are “concerned” about how large their children’s Web footprints might be, wanting to know if their kids “are on there, if they are being talked about, if they are referred to in any way, or if their friends, schools or associates are.”

Despite confusion and technophobia, Mom and Pop can indeed find that out.

The entire article is available @ Mark Cuban Advises Parents Re Searching MySpace.

Some politically-motivated users of the publicly-edited online encyclopedia WikiPedia are rewriting political biographies of politicians to make friends look good and foes look bad.

According to a recent AP article –

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that can be altered by anyone with a computer, has proved remarkably useful for pulling political dirty tricks.

Political operatives are covertly rewriting _ or defacing _ candidates’ biographical entries to make the boss look good or the opponent look ridiculous.

As a result, political campaigns are monitoring the Web site more closely than ever this election year.

Revisions made by Capitol Hill staffers became so frequent and disruptive earlier this year that Wikipedia temporarily blocked access to the site from some congressional Internet addresses. The pranks included bumping up the age of the Senate’s oldest member, West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, from 88 to 180, and giving crude names to other lawmakers.

You can read the entire article @ Wikipedia Ripe for Political Dirty Tricks.

Qwika is a search engine that indexes wikis and makes their articles searchable for internet users. Qwika’s goal is to eventually index every wiki that is available online. At the time of this posting, the Qwika search engine has indexed 1,158 wikis containing 21,964,380 searchable articles. This is a great search engine for journalists and other online research professionals who want the ability to search numerous wikis at once.

You can access the Qwika search engine @ Qwika.com.

The PodZinger search allows users to search the entire content of audio and video podcasts just like regular search engines, using key words and phrases.

You can use the PodZinger search engine @ PodZinger.