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One thing we have tried...is labeling - have users annotate the search results they see and have those annotations be shared with people on their social network or with people of like mind and interest. We did that in the form of Google Co-Op... We've seen success there in things like health. There have been a few topical areas that have had a lot of traction, but overall the annotation model needs to evolve.

...Another classic thing to try is "other users like you," where you build implicit social connections between users who are like each other, much like Amazon does with books. Examples: "Other users like you also searched for" or "other people who did this search also did searches." It works to give you related queries, but again it doesn't fundamentally change the social experience or capture that movie or restaurant recommendation request that would be one of the classical examples of verbal social search.

I think there is the possibility of taking a social network and combining some element of annotations and searches done. For example, if I have 400 friends on Facebook, and I knew 10 of them all searched for one topic today, that might interest me. So aggregate statistics might work. In truth, there are a bunch of things you could try. You can take the annotations that people enter through something like Google Co-Op and broadcast the annotations. Presumably when someone is writing a search result, they don't mind if other people see it and read it. [Oh, right, which is why all these people who googled how to murder their spouses turned to you.]

PageRank itself relies on the link structure of the web to try to find the most authoritative pages. For example, it's clear that people would attribute more authority to the pages that their friends have visited. So if we took Web History and allowed that data to influence rankings, such that pages that your friends have visited were now bumped up in your search ranking, that that might be a good augmentation to something like personalized search. In essence, it's a fusion of personalized and social search. In this case, what we would do is say: This Gmail account which maps to Marissa Mayer then maps to these other friends, allow those friends to influence this ranking... But no, we have not done anything like that to date.