Collaborative search

One (small) drawback of the librarian profession is that one rarely gets to be a part of those exciting search parties and posses that one sometimes sees on television and in films. However, as Greg Notess points out in a recent Infotoday article (SearchTogether: A Tech Preview of Social Search Programs), librarians may soon be able to get a taste of that excitement without leaving their terminals. Notess focuses primarily on Microsoft's Search Together, which requires IE and a plugin and Live Messenger accounts on both the searcher and collaborator side. Collaborative search seems to me to be a very interesting concept for any consortium of librarians, and though I'm not ready to migrate from Firefox to IE, I'm looking forward to other download-free applications of the concept. Three products that incorporate aspects of social searching are Yoople (human ranking of search results), Delver (refines results according who the searcher is - e.g. teenager or senior citizen - and what social group has created and referenced the information), and Wikia Search (allows you to add sites, related terms, and images to search results)