Social search engines are working hard at developing a dialog with their user-base requesting feedback and encouraging engagement. Most are building search on the premise that people can add a whole lot more incremental value on top of traditional keyword matching algorithmic engines. Adoption and ramping up usage is one of social search engines’ critical success factors to build scale, reach critical mass and generate that network effect to effectively surface that “people & community” value layer, although not everybody needs to be tagging, commenting, sharing, bookmarking for social search to be effective. TrailFire’s approach is pretty good. Discover what you are looking for on the Web using like-minded people’s trails. Trails can be private or public, shared via email, by posting them on any website or by publishing them on Trailfire.com. Following is TrailFire’s latest announcement from CEO John O’Halloran.
“I am pleased to announce that we have just released a new version […. […] allows you to form a private or public interest groups so you can more easily share your discoveries […]. For example, two or more people can now work together to organize a trip or shop collaboratively on the web. Teachers can guide their students to associated class material anywhere on the web. A fan club could guide their friends to hot web sites about their favorite celebrities”.

Before cleaning up the logs from spam and seeded content, IceRocket’s BlogTrend Tool is reporting a little bit over 2 posts per day.

Technorati is reporting consistent coverage, between 0 and 5 citations a day. Posts that contain Trailfire per day for the last 30 days.

Go TrailFire