and just you wait until FF begins introducing a "relevancy" filter for searches that sort by "interestingness" (i.e. comments, likes, etc.). Once they come out with their ranking algorithm which correlates time/immediacy with rank (comments/likes) and once more content begins to pool here they will have a search engine more powerful than Google. This is powerful search stuff. - Thomas Hawk

As long as enough people are talking and blogging about photography, it works. Any archivists on FF, or records managers on FF? - Dave "Freedom 35"

That's the thing David. Google will still excel at obscure search. But if you want to see interesting things about Photography or the iPhone or Obama or alcohol or your favorite company or more general search, social filtering will provide a superior experience to Google or Yahoo or MSFT. It's amazing how good search is now at FF and they *are not even using the social metadata yet!* Just you wait until they let their algorithm loose on the world for that. - Thomas Hawk

No doubt FF is going to be a very useful and fruitful search engine. However they still need to improve the speed of indexing. Search results are far behind the latest entries. - Yuval Atzmon

Now maybe MSFT is actually watching FF. But I don't get the sense that they are. Or Yahoo. But it blows me away that MSFT would pay $100 million for Powerset, a company's whose search technology I've tried and sucks, while ignoring the power in search that is FF. Filtering search by what the general population likes and even more by what your social circle likes is the future of search. - Thomas Hawk

atzmon, that will come in time. What we have today is proof of concept. Everything else is just time. Why does Flickr have the best image search on the internet today? Because of social meta data and ranking. Why is it that Yahoo could never capitalize on this for web search when they had a 3 year head start on everyone else with delicious, flickr, upcoming. etc? - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, I ahve began using FF search as the main Searchlet. google is so web1.0 kindish. My only pain point is that FF does not yeild results for term that is part of the comment content. It is only taking main URI /txt - Peter Dawson

atzmon - i haven't found that to be the case - my searches are returning results that have threads minutes old - ff is a great example of social grid search & how its starting to replace traditional search imho - nice thread thomas :) - mike "glemak" dunn

think about this. As *good* as search is today at FF. they have not even released their "relevancy" feature yet which coordinates rank (comments/likes) with most recent. It will be even more powerful once they do this and I bet that they are working on this right now. - Thomas Hawk

Thomas, one of the first things that caught my attention about FF in the first place was its potential in the search area. I'm willing to give them all the time they need because I'm sure it's going to pay off for me as a user. While we're on the subject, they do have a few basic features to implement, like a bit of morphology. Try searching for 'tactic' and 'tactics', compare the results you get. - Yuval Atzmon

I agree with Thomas. The potential is certainly there. But to be truly useful, it needs a much wider range of users. The interests currently represented here are relatively narrow. - Dan Kaplan

Agree, though not sure if they want to be seen as a search engine. - tomio geron

Love Thomas Hawk's remarks about relevancy and interestingness search algorithms, and concur with Dan Kaplan about the need for a much larger user base to make the search results truly worthwhile. - Sean McBride

tomio, they may not yet. In the same way that I'm sure Flickr didn't want to be seen as a "search engine" either. FF has to first and foremost present itself as a community and as a useful social aggregation tool. Search is the byproduct -- but search is where monetization takes place most powerfully. Dan, depth of content will come with time. Same as what happened with Flickr. - Thomas Hawk

Pretty soon, Friendfeed will even be able to cook your eggs and butter your toast. - Shawn Farner

Good point Shawn and a good reminder that BREAKFAST IS FOR WINNERS!!! - Thomas Hawk

Social search is clearly an important monetization opportunity for any aggregator - John McCrea

I'm tremendously amused that the first thing when I do the search is "Why I think Thomas Hawk is a Great Photographer" - David Thomas

http://friendfeed.com/summary... You can filter the day/week/month summaries by service, so that link is the most popular flickr photos this week - Glenn Slaven

Product searches could certainly be highly monetizable and provide much better/harder-to-game results than Google - Nicholas Molnar

Thanks for this tip, Thomas... it works great and seems very snappy. Also, it's a reliable way to get at my own twitter archive :-/ - Richard ¿digame? Walker

Agree, this has really turned my head recently. I didn't really use FF, but now find it an extremely useful resource - Kol Tregaskes

Agreed. I often check friendfeed (before Google) on certain topics. I do value the shares (and opinions) of my friends more than that of strangers picked by a Google-bot. - Czar

For any that may not have noticed, search results have their own RSS feed. If you find yourself doing the same searches over and over it would be worth creating an imaginary friend with that search results feed in the profile. Your search results would then be folded right into your friends stream. - Jim Stanger