Social search in drug design and what is Wikia

Social search engines, another kind of social software, are trying to include user knowledge for improving search results in the future. One example is Wikia with an announcement of Jimmy Wales

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And we are making it open source.

In contrast to the problem described by randfish might this improve search quality and reduce search engine tweaking requirements by users. Sometimes users have e.g. to multiply search terms or to find other tweaks, for getting the search results you want. Early initiatives like the the open directory project DMOZ (@Wikipedia) are using already user organized classification schemes for web links. SWiK organizes open source project information in a Wiki-like manner.I am still a little bit puzzled to understand what the actual difference to social bookmarking systems is. Are social bookmarking services not already ranking the relevance of web links?Lets do a test on some drug design search terms. I added the tags E(experts/users), R(anking), M(ini information page). Here a '+' indicates that this feature is available a '-' means that this feature is disabled at the moment (e.g. in Wikia) or not available (yet).

Term	Wikia (+-E,+-R)	del.ico.us (+E,-R)	Digg (+E,+R)	Technorati (+E,+R)	CiteULike (+E,+R)
Data mining	36247-M	yes	615	14630	496
Drug design	34964-M	yes	285	14966	493
Bioinformatics	16937+M	yes	75	4698	496
Structural biology	7925-M	yes	60	1758	499
Organic synthesis	4403-M	yes	15	1979	498
Medicinal chemistry	3216-M	yes	45	1686	498
Kinase	2843-E-M	yes	30	1248	498
Molecular modelling	2261-M	yes	30	208	491
Cheminformatics	460+M	yes	1	147	60
GPCR	252-E-M	yes	1	121	497

Wikia is still an alpha version and user ranking of links seems to be somehow available, but does not work (yet). Though, I like the general appearance and hope to see there some new features soon. Using del.ico.us as search engine is just useless in my opinion, because I have not found any way ranking the results. Digg might be in theory useful, but lacks scientific content. Technorati is rather a news alerting service than a search engine. CiteULlike points towards scientific articles, but why are all categories delivering less than 500 hits here?