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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

So, do you think it's time to start adding a top links and help them out?

I have started tailoring my searches in odd ways to help them out. Ex: Adding a the year when I want current results. But, without useful links it's all GIGO.

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I think Google knows about this exact problem. They know that the links people are sharing on Facebook and Twitter have supplanted the site-site links, and are therefore much more important to search quality. To this end, the agreement to include 'real-time' search data from Twitter is partially a misdirection, since the importance of having the data about shared links far exceeds the value of someones 140-character blurb.

A related point: whoever first owns the data from all link aggregators (digg, reddit, mixx, etc) and all URL shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl, ad nauseum), and weighs those results more heavily is going to have an awesome search engine... albeit better for entertainment than productivity.

whoever first owns the data from all link aggregators (digg, reddit, mixx, etc) and all URL shorteners (bit.ly, tinyurl, ad nauseum), and weighs those results more heavily is going to have an awesome search engine... albeit better for entertainment than productivity.

i will humbly disagree. i think folks who browse the web are different from those who search the web. search is what gets you the most relevant results, therefore more opportunity for ad money.

Except I'd never find the obscure stuff that Google helps me find every day. I don't think a lot of links to manuals,mailing lists, etc show up on any of the sources you mention.

No, you'd keep the long-tail search results in tact, but then tend to surface the good content people are actually sharing amongst themselves.

Google already does this, by surfacing youtube videos in many search queries.

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