(Disclosure from the outset: I work at HeyStaks, the startup ref'ed by Paul) There's a few different takes on what "social search" means, the most popular bein

(Disclosure from the outset: I work at HeyStaks, the startup ref'ed by Paul) There's a few different takes on what "social search" means, the most popular being that described by others here, where the results you see are influenced by the activities of your direct friends on FB / Tw / etc. However, my friends can't help me when i'm looking for darkroom tips or information on how to tune a banjo, or even what hotel to stay in, except where they happen to have stayed in the city i'm going to. The thing is, when i'm looking for information, ideally i'll get someone with expert knowledge to help but I don't mind if I know the person or not, I just want to find cool pages relevant to my interests. We've tried to take an open view of what HeyStaks is, by facilitating friends planning a trip, or work colleagues collaborating on a project, or hobbyists sharing information over the long term, all to have somewhere to create a shared resource that enables them to collaborate on their shared search topic. The idea is, you create a "search stak" on any topic, narrow or broad, short- or long-term and invite others to join it. You can make it public so anyone can join, or private so you can control membership. As stak members search on Google, Bing or Yahoo! with our browser (Firefox, Chrome fast approacing) app or mobile (iPhone, Android on the way!) app installed, the pages they think are relevant to the stak topic can be stored anonymously and recommended to others for similar searches in the future. I think over the coming months and years the true nature of what "social search" is will emerge more fully, for now there are multiple takes on it and it may well stay that way, but what we're shooting for is an environment where search effort on the major engines is captured for later reuse, enabling fully collaborative, anonymous social search. Maurice Coyle VP Product Development HeyStaks - Web search. shared.