The Advance of Social Graph Based Search
Robert Scoble has 3-part series of videos on how the ideas behind Mahalo and what he calls Social Graph Based Search will soon be a far better method of finding information than Google.
Above: Scoble on Social Graph Based Search
The short version is this: user referrals are faster and more effective than a Google search which is biased by SEO. The idea is the people you know and those with the highest reputation will provide the most relevant information without the noise.
As I write this, Scoble is chatting with users who found these videos, mostly through twitter, or another form of friend referral on a chat window overlaid on Kyte.tv.
Whether you agree this is the future of information discovery or not it’s a cool example the growing importance of referral based search, how fast it is, and how new platforms can spontaneously generate and facilitate conversations in real time.