There's an interesting article comparing the internet (specifically the web) to a human brain. It notes that web pages are much like neurons and that the interconnectivity of said pages parallels how brains develop (highly important neurons have many connections while less important neurons are… less well connected. Likewise, a neurons importance can change by how it's connected to). It's an interesting thought exercise.
Of course, one problem with that line of thought is that there's no general guiding force behind this "mental growth". While the "brain" grows, it doesn't actually learn anything, nor is it capable of individual thought. You really can't ask the web anything.
Ok, so you really can't ask your brain anything either. You have to use proper communications channels like your vision, hearing, taste, and touch centers. (i'll add that while each of these are capable of producing similar results, they can often produce wildly different ones and folks generally don't complain.)
So, something like social search should actually be fairly straightforward, right?
Well, no. Unlike that mass of jelly and cooked pasta in your skull, there are literally billions of highly intelligent entities crafting completely arbitrary neurons, like this one. (If this were to happen in your head, that would probably be called "cancer" and you'd not be very happy. Yay! i'm a cancer!)
i suppose there might be certain weighting being done by favoring specific "trusted" sites over less trusted ones (Hmm… seems like that's been done before.) which, like you, would favor certain types of behavior over others, but again, this is contrary to an "unbiased" view would be. Oh, don't give me that. You are too biased. Everyone is. You simply call it "favorite" and base your preferences off of perceived reward.
Thing is, i'm not sure that having a group or individual craft that sort of thought is really the best way to approach the problem. It's like having a child that literally can't think for himself. There's a term for that. What's more, the web never asks questions of you.
Perhaps what is needed is not more hand-crafting of the constant tide of information, but instead the ability for the web to start learning for itself. Perhaps it needs to be able to ask, learn and discover on it's own. Of course, the thought of actually birthing the bastard child of HAL and SkyNet is probably not horribly appealing to many, but i don't really think it's all that far fetched.
Besides, considering the bulk of the net, it'd probably spend most of it's time looking at porn and wondering when that guy in Nigeria will send the $30 Billion. (Morale: Give the net thought, but don't get it a credit card.)
