Hi, my name is Terry Smith and I'm a developer and aspiring entrepreneur.

A lot of my ideas revolve around social and that’s because I think people are way more involved in the web sites they visit.  They’re more comfortable with being involved and they actually enjoy it.

So why can’t we apply these ideas to search?  I would imagine that the big 3 (Google, Yahoo and MSN) already take user clicks into effect.  However, I think that a search engine should be trained by the people to find things that they actually want.  Where Google says that machines should be responsible for organizing everything, that mantra is going to grow outdated.  Now that people are involved in user-generated content on sites like Digg, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. the ability to scale your business is possible with user feedback and “human powered” results.

One of the most successful sales models to date is the related results you see Amazon or Netflix: “Users who liked this also liked…”.  Why not bring that same model to organizing search results?  Find a good initial model to rank results (or even use Yahoo BOSS or something similar) and then store your own rankings based on what users clicked through to.  Did they come back to that search page 30 seconds later and try to find another result?  Which one did they finally stay on?  You won’t know for sure, but you can make an educated guess.  And the more feedback you have, the better your search results become.

Feedback is welcome; as always, thanks for reading.