[mikekchar]

Here is an idea that I've always wanted to do, but will never have time for: A curated search engine.

Basically the idea is to have people band together and "recommend" links. You then do your normal spidering of the websites to create a search engine (or even just call through to a number of existing search engines). However, the ranking of the results is based on the weighting of the recommendations.

It's essentially a white list based on your own personal bubble. Of course this won't work in general because you will always get SEO creeps spamming recommendations. However, it gives you tools for working around those creeps. The average person probably won't be able to manage it, but power users probably will.

By not trying to solve the problem for everybody, it makes it easier to solve to problem for some people. Or at least that's my thesis :-) I might be wrong.