Search engines seem to be either testing or moving towards a social search paradigm. Some of the examples include: http://www.younanimous.com http://www.eurekster.com/ Also, Yahoo is testing its social search engine: http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/faq With numerous businesses relying on search engine rankings primarily, if not exclusively, an important question to ask is: What would be the future of Internet Marketing/SEO? Some of the rather instant thoughts that come to mind are: * Internet Marketing would further move towards a paid model with in-organic results over taking the organic ones. * The search engine rankings would not only be driven by the search engine algorithms. * The importance of currently existing concepts namely Google PageRank would recede. * Content would rule: Websites serving quality content would attract repeat quality visitors and higher popularity resulting in even higher traffic. * Meta search engines that integrate a number of tools like digg, del.icio.us etc. would further gain popularity. It is now time for companies around the world re-think their long term Internet Marketing strategies and plan accordingly to minimize the "damage" social search engines might cause! More later!

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