Sharetivity has already provided a solution for disjointed content sharing by allowing you to share, save and discuss your favorite pages all in one convenient location. But how does one find the best content to begin with?

Coming soon to Sharetivity is the answer to common search engine woes, from sifting through irrelevant search results to racking one’s brains for elaborate keyword phrases to find exactly what you’re looking for.

The concept of “social search” emerged a few years ago on the Webosphere when social networking began to connect us through nearly every step of our online paths: e-mail, chat, online communities, photo-sharing sites… but what about search?

Traditional search engines use algorithms to calculate top search results based on relevant keywords, amount of site content and other factors that might not interest you as a user, such as a web site’s age.

Social search, however, is a different story. Based on a user’s social network and personal sharing history, social search results display Web pages that have been previously identified as  “good” by a human action, such as “e-mail a friend,” “post to Facebook” or “bookmark with Sharetivity.”

In an article about the evolution of search engines, “search engine guru” Danny Sullivan describes social search as Web 4.0: “the move for search engines to make use of human data as part of their ranking systems.” He notes that social search may do wonders for increasing relevancy when searching for specific content, as even sites that are merely related to your favorite pages will get a boost in your search results.

Basically, if you were to type in “gardener in Palo Alto” into a social search engine, your top results may provide contact information for a gardening service that your neighbor has reviewed on Yelp. On a traditional search engine, however, you might encounter an endless Yellow Pages-like database of California gardeners in which you must sift through endless business names before randomly selecting the one that sounds the best.

Word of mouth remains a prized indicator of quality on all fronts… so why should that be any different on the Web?

Stay tuned for the newest development in sharing innovation from Sharetivity…