It looks obvious

Yesterday, in a response to my blog posting about Rollyo.com, Dave wrote:

“The sharing is a good way to discover new resources or find information based on the domain expertise of someone else”.

This is a good argument and it is hard to argue. My wife uses the comments in Amazon before purchasing so why not here? Today I saw posts by Fred Wilson and by Jeff Jarvis Pointing to lenses they created on the new service Squidoo. This service is very much like Rollyo.com offering a search guided by someones expertise.
So, what is the problem? What is wrong with Riffs, Rollyo and Squidoo or Yahoo!Answer?
To start, the data gathering model is problematic, as noted by Jeff Jarvis:

“its hard to convince people to contribute content to me when they can now control content on their own“.

Although Dave reports on 15,000 subscribe searches on Rollyo , and I have no reason to doubt his numbers, I think that the real test is over time and not necessary long time.
I wish I had the silver bullet of how to harness the information that people hold into comprehensive search results. But I think that from reviewing and trying the services I listed I can come up with several why not reasons. The first is that these services are the main reason for people to Visit the site. I do not see the motivation over time for people to keep coming when the return is very low. As a contrast I think that Amazon’s approach to build recommendations and search engines. This is a way to harness useful information without requesting from the customer to contribute a thing. In order to convince me to spend time contributing content, Squidoo is on the right track offering measurable return. Yahoo, on the other hand, believe that the honor of submitting content into Yahoo’s database should be sufficient:

Level Yahoo Answers! Thanks You’s Colors Points
7 Be the first to find out! Black 25000+
6 Be the first to find out! Brown 10000 - 24,999
5 Be eligible to be a Featured User on the home page masthead. Purple 5,000 - 9,999
4 Be eligible to be a Featured User on the community editorial page. (coming soon!) Green 2,500-4,999
3 A super-special Yahoo! Answers thank you. Blue 1,000-2,499
2 A special Yahoo! Answers thank you. Yellow 250-999
1 Full access to Yahoo! Answers! White 0-249

But if this is not enough I’m very skeptical about the social search. It is one thing when I buy a camera, when its technical features can easily define; it is different when Im planning for vacation. When I want to ask my friends for opinion I call them on the net I will look for an expert.
It seems that the differences between these, and many other, site are semantic. Im still hoping for Google type start up that will come with different approach and change the way we think about search.

Technorati Tags: Rollyo, Web 2.0, Bubble, Squidoo, riffs, Yahoo!Answers, Google, Amazon