The idea of using social signals in search is strong and I've been looking with increasing interest at Blekko recently. Yet it seems pathological that your search quality can be dependent on the quality of your social graph.

I know there are a lot of fake accounts on Facebook in our current FarmVille era (many actually named "Farm Ville") so that people can maintain a separate identity to play games. Is it going to come to this? That we're going to have to join interest groups or even create a new identity to make our searches not be full of worthless stuff?

FWIW, blekko lets you disable use of Facebook likes data. Opt-outs are good.

I don't really look at likes data as improving the quality of my search. I think of it as asking my social graph what their opinion is. I expect that to tell me what's popular, not what's best.

That's a good perspective, thanks. It's looking really promising.

I still wonder how I can inform a social search that I'm "me at work" -- i.e. I'm more interested in what's popular with Hacker News users, not the people I jibber-jabber with on Facebook. I'm constantly searching YC comments for any technical subject.