The next step to take into account the searcher's profile in social networking context, considering not just my own profile, but also the profiles of those whom I interact with. Ideally, social search would also take into account a social voting or scoring system, in which the search results favored by my social network increase in relevance.

The more that a search engine knows about you (including information about your social network), the better that search results can be tailored to you. But privacy issues abound - how information is too much for a company to ahve about you. There are already privacy concerns about Google and others. And we all know that Google is also an advertising company. The challenge will be to find a balance between improved search results and maintaining privacy of personal data. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.