Social search engines

The web landscape has undergone massive changes in the past years. On the other hand, search engine technology has not quite kept the same pace. In this article we look at the current scenarios, and argue how social flows can be used to make up for a better generation of search engines. We consider how society and technological progress somehow changed the rules of the game, introducing good but also bad components, and see how this situation could be modeled by search engines. Along this line of thinking, we show how the real components of interest are not just web pages, but flows of information of any kind, that need to be merged: this opens up for a wide range of improvements and far-looking developments, towards a new horizon of social search.