Community search is becoming more and more mainstream. PreFound.com is the easiest to use community search site on the web, but very few people know about it since our beta test has been limited to just you guys. But, related to community search being the next "big thing", there are signs everywhere. Search SIG is hosting the "SDForum Search SIG - Search Different: Tagging, Social Bookmarking and Sharing - Jan 10th @ Yahoo - Featuring Del.icio.us, Digg, Kaboodle & Wink", which you can check out at http://searchsig.wordpress.com/ Of course, Del.icio.us is now part of Yahoo, and Yahoo is hosting the event, so that should be interesting.

Another find was an article that actually printed last October in PC Magazine, which reviewed the early versions of a number of community search sites. The article contains quotes like, "Such sites can cut through the clutter that a typical Google search might return by adding the human element. After all, communities of knowledgeable, interested people can identify relevant sites with greater accuracy than a search engine. Plus, you can leverage the work already done by others and build on that base rather than repeat it." Wow, you would have though this was a press release about PreFound.com. You can check out the whole article at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1875208,00.asp

Lastly, a lot of important people are saying that traditional search engines don't meet the needs of everyone. One is Mr. Sour Grapes himself, (too late to the search party) Bill Gates. In an article printed on Cnet he's quoted as saying, "Well, search is bad today." And his CEO, Mr. Ballmer says, "Half the searches don't give you an answer that you wanted anyway.", so clearly there is room for human indexing of the web, like we're trying to do at PreFound.com. Check out the article at http://news.com.com/Microsoft+Were+in+fighting+shape+-+page+2/2008-1082_3-6020157-2.html?tag=st.num and thanks for testing PreFound.com