the state of social search engines

reading more about these social search engines and their potential.... an article in econtent magazine that i had in my bag and recently read (its amazing what you can get done while waiting for a kid to finish swim practice :) called Teams Work: Social search gets results

some interesting things:

Mahalo - builds content by paying contributors so that relevant results are returned. when i clicked on a languages to see what they had, the page feels like a wikipedia page - content entered by someone as a resource expert.

ChaCha - being called "search with a guide" to connect to a live being as trained and paid by ChaCha. ChaCha has also partnered with Indiana University to create a search engine using the library and IT staff.....

One thing that struck me was a quote from Baynote (provides community-guided software and services) who believes "visitors are not burdened with the need to perform explicit actions, such as completing surveys, tagging, or engaging in other time-intensive and distracting process." This refers to that 1% of the online population that does tag and blog....but needing to tap into the larger population (called the invisible crowd) as a better indicator of behavior. Is this invisible crowd finding what they are looking for? Do they leave empty-handed, so to speak? A recent Wall Street Journal article talks about a survey indicating that 83% of visitors DON'T find information they are looking for from a search engine - wow - that's huge! (my apologies for not finding the article to link to from here....time permitting i will try to find it later unless any intrepid librarian would like to add this :)

Amongst the myriad of things to be keeping an eye on, i think social search is one of 'em - are you using any social search engine? finding them useful? better?