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”.

All this should sound familiar if you have read the blogosphere coverage of Google capturing Web history beyond saving search history. To make a long and sophisticated story short and simple, it’s like transposing PageRank’s content link authority to people’s Web connectivity. Then take that social Web map and personalize it down to a community or user level. In a different way, it’s also not unlike StumbleUpon’s discovery engine, getting some interesting coverage of its own as well.

Now, is TrailFire generating buzz? Following at BlogPulse’s and other charts monitoring noise and chatting in the blogosphere.

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.

Technorati Chart

Go TrailFire