What if we harness the "social networks" phenomena for the web search. Like, using del.isio.us tags for web search. Shenghua Bao from Apex Lab provides some ideas on how this could be implemented. One of his papers discusses usage of tags in language model construction for retrieval, another focuses on creating a social counterpart of PageRank using user tags.
There are probably many other possibilities, like enriching original query words with most query-similar tags, or using tag clouds for discovering key concepts and emerging "hot" topics, but to the best of my knowledge these are still mostly unexplored.
Am I wrong?
