We all kneel to Google search paradigm. The paradigm is based on the study of the relational structure between pages that is created by the complex network of links.
The idea came to Larry when he mapped (in his mind) hyperlinks to citations and web-pages to peer-reviewed papers. Basically, he adapted the ranking concept used within the scientific community (i.e. the number of citations a scientist has for his papers) to rank the internet pages (i.e. the number of links that directs to a given internet page). Thus was born the PageRank concept. At the time (1995) there was still no easy way to tell how many links an internet page had pointing at it. The merit of Larry (and Sergei) was to actually craft a working crawler that would collect and retrieve this information. Well... that and actually sorting and indexing all the gathered webpages according to the PageRank rule.

The Yahoo! guys however, at the time, had a more organic arrangement and sorting of web-pages. Kind of like a giant directory of web-pages, sorted by topics and keywords. They made no relevant use of the internet hyperlink structure.

Time prooved that the structural search paradigm took the best over organic search. The PageRank had won the battle. The Google guys coined the google verb "to google", and became the bleeding edge of what was going on in the Internet. Over a decade has passed since the outcome of this paradigm clash, and never was another paradigm to point its nose into the battlefield. Up until now...

As the web grew into a social place, peer-to-peer pandemia settled in, RSS feeds arrived, blogs emerged, wikis came, flickr flipped over the table, tagging and bookmarking truly flourished with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, YouTube democratized video broadcasting, I-Pod mania tuned people's ears, a rush of new uses of the web surged. Eventually people labeled all that Web 2.0. A social, rich user-experience, information trading place. Economics will never be the same again. Sharing actually becomes (or will become) the economy driver for internet markets!
But that's not what I wanted to talk about today.

I intend to put forward StumbleUpon, or del.icio.us as an alternate, concurrent and complementary search engine: the organic 2.0 paradigm.
As people become more responsive in the internet and provide more feedback, tagging is the new thing. It actually sorts and indexes pages. Imagine millions and millions of internauts tagging each page they get interested upon, sharing their bookmarks, creating tagged-communities (united around a specific tag-subset). As of today. Reality or fiction? Will it prove really useful for searching issues? I know not. Time will tell.
What does organic 2.0 paradigm has that organic 1.0 didn't? The critical mass of active users, for once. And two, The social experience. As a collateral symptome of this new paradigm, the Time magazine personality of the year is "You", the average internet user. At the time, Time meant that the content of the internet was now provided by the average internet user in blogs, wikis and homemade videos and that this was something new in the internet short history. But what I mean today is, that the ranking of the internet will also be provided by the average user. We could call it the Democratic Rank.

Around a year before del.icio.us emerged, a bright friend of mine conceived the link-sharing community and started on its own web-based app. But college kept him from truly investing himself in it, and well, time passed, and del.icio.us rolled out the web. But that's another story. What I really mean is that... I'm going to spend some more time in giving a shot at using SumbleUpon and del.icio.us before actually googling. Call it gut feeling ...