Search engines getting a dose of humanity

Since the dawn of the search engine optimization profession, there's been a near-monopoly on the focus of how algorithms affect rankings versus human beings. That's starting to change, as the influence of Web 2.0 creeps into the results.

Most recently, Techcrunch highlighted the fact that Yahoo was utilizing Del.icio.us data to enhance search results. Showing how many times a site had been tagged, as well as what tags they assigned to the page via the popular social bookmarking site arguably helps users choose the best sites.

And Yahoo is not alone in mashing up social search and traditional search. For example, Google -- as well as Yahoo -- both integrate YouTube videos into their listings via universal search. Additionally, Google is believed to be finding ways to improve results by tracking user behavior while logged into services such as Google Toolbar, Gmail and Web History.

Users of StumbleUpon can also have data mixed into their search results by enabling a feature via the StumbleUpon toolbar. Users see anything from zero to four stars next to each website title.

Integrating a certain amount of human touch, particularly when it’s automated, makes a lot of sense. Data included from social services that rank sites, blog posts, news stories and the like are often more useful and relevant, as they have a participatory element -- votes, comments, tags, etc. -- created by actual human beings, as opposed to being entirely based on a mathematical algorithm.

Startups in this space looking to cash in on social search include Mahalo, a service that relies heavily on human editors to deliver the most relevant results. Another is Wikia Search, which is being developed by the people who brought us Wikipedia. It’s currently in Alpha.

These approaches have their critics, of course. There's little in the way of stopping an organization from outsourcing tagging responsibilities to people in developing countries on the cheap. There are also failures. For instance, MyWeb, Yahoo's old tagging system, was briefly integrated into Yahoo search results before quietly disappearing.

At present, there is little doubt that human preferences will more directly influence the search experience, both on a personalized level and in aggregate. The debate that does exists centers mainly on how it will happen, and which model(s) will ultimately succeed.