Only You Can Save The Search Engines

The fact that the search engine emperors have no clothes is one that nobody seems to like to talk about. What I mean is, search engine results suck. How often do you search for something even remotely complicated and get truely great results at the top of the list?

Watching the world of tagging emerge, the idea of enabling users to contribute to solving this problem has been occuring to me lately - not that user input or feedback is a new idea - but it was brilliantly brought up today in a post by Bubblegeneration who took it a step further and suggested that users get paid for helping.

Search deperately needs to catch up with the hype and dollars. It needs lots of improved vertical search solutions. It needs the invisible tabs to get visible. It needs a lot more 'spam pages' to be filtered out. The algo's and the engines that own them can't do it alone. I hope they let us help.