Collaborative information processing. Dean Giustini pulls together some links, ideas, and questions on the future of search engine optimization.

I don't think we will see search engines abandoning indexing and quantified measures of relevance like PageRank anytime soon. Instead, I expect to see search engines leveraging and integrating metadata generated by collaborative filtering and categorization efforts. Having Delicious metadata integrated into Yahoo search results is one example of this.

I also expect to see search engines leveraging social networks to filter information and assign relevance to search results. Google's OpenSocial API and the Facebook Platform are examples of initiatives to provide the common social network infrastructure necessary for the next generation of collaborative information sharing tools to really take off. Until this situation stabilizes, we will continue to see small-scale implementations of collaborative tools that should be considered proof-of-concept implementations more then anything else.