VibeAgent and the future of social search

TechCrunch announced that VibeAgent launched today. Speaking as a guy working for a hotel company, it’’s pretty cool. The weight VibeAgent gives to reviews to determine search relevance is excellent, and a feature other social search engines would do well to copy, er, liberate, er, emulate. I agree with TechCrunch that they’’re swimming upstream against TripAdvisor – and may be neither different enough, nor clear enough to consumers – to capture that side of the market. But its underlying concepts provide an excellent model for other social search sites. More important, it provides businesses with an excellent view of what consumers may expect in their search results going forward and what types of content businesses will need to ensure they’’re found in those results.