> That's a lot harder for most people to manage than just using a search box.
Hey, sounds like a business opportunity. "Join our bogon-buster network! [fine print: invite only, your activities and reviews will be rated by other members.]"
Of course, after awhile, you'll need another layer on top of it to make sure that your bogon-buster networks aren't full of spammers themselves.
Yes, you then have the same problem suffered by most social networks.
I actually think a similar problem has been partially solved by Twitter already. Twitter grows but the content curation is done by the people you follow therefore new users don't affect your interactions on the site unless you let them. Of course, there's gardening work which has to be done by the user in getting to this point but it would probably be less work than browsing some of Google's search results.
Additionally the intelligent thing would be to mine the social interactions of authoritative users to provide public data for users that don't want to engage with the app.
edit: Of course, it's possible to become an authoritative spammer in which case as a power user you will still need to garden the group of users that you interact with.
So why not adapt the Twitter model to this? You can choose who to include in your Bogon-net, and maybe set different confidence requirements; e.g., "Show me only results that at least 50% of my Bogon-busters have rated, and only show me results that have a 75% approval rating."
The problems I already see are a) having to compute all those scores, and b) I'm unlikely to rate more than a handful of sites a day - I think Google tried that with their browser toolbar, too.
Hey, sounds like a business opportunity. "Join our bogon-buster network! [fine print: invite only, your activities and reviews will be rated by other members.]"
Of course, after awhile, you'll need another layer on top of it to make sure that your bogon-buster networks aren't full of spammers themselves.