By Claudia Bruemmer

The way we search on the web is changing as new search engines make social networking a part of the search experience. New search engine Blekko allows searchers to use their Facebook friends to filter web queries. Montage from Microsoft’s Future Social Experience Labs (FUSE) allows users to gather recent web content on a specific topic, making a digital album of their links for sharing on Twitter or Facebook.

Web search is becoming more interactive as people continue to find ways to share information online. When Leslie Stahl asked Mark Zuckerman on “60 Minutes” last month if he wanted to take over the Internet, he replied by saying that “…people don’t’ want to be alone when they search, they want to share information with their friends.”

Internet search engines have become indispensable in everyday life; in fact, people take them for granted. However, as Zuck pointed out to all on TV, search is not social, it’s a solitary experience. You can share the results of your query by pasting a link into email or a tweet on Twitter, but there is no way to immediately share the information you find while searching.

Meanwhile, people have taken to social networking in a big way. Facebook, which just got $500 million funding and is said to be valued at $50 billion, is becoming more search-engine-like with its “Posts By Everyone” search feature that works like a search engine. Two new search engines, Blekko and Montage, are trying to put the social interaction into search as well.

Blekko, a search engine based in Redwood City, CA, uses human editors to select authoritative websites and wants to screen out spam and the links promoted by SEO techs trying to influence search results in behalf of their clients. One million spam pages are created every hour according to Blekko’s “Spam Clock” showing the total spam pages created since January 1, 2011.

Blekko also allows users to customize their search results by using their Facebook friends to filter their web queries. When Blekko users enable this feature, the search engine collects the large database of websites and pages that have been “liked” by the user’s Facebook friends. So it’s like your friends provide the algorithm instead of Google.

The reasoning behind filtering queries this way is that when a friend “likes” an article or a website, that person is providing a quality vote; especially since it’s someone the user knows. That vote is saying “this is a quality site, it’s not spam.” This can be a powerful tool if you have a lot of Facebook friends.

Another new social search engine is Montage, an experiment by Microsoft’s Future Social Experience Labs (FUSE). This is a 30-person Microsoft team working on making search a real-time, media-rich experience where people can share with friends.

Montage allows users to gather recent content on the web on specific topics of their choice, including news stories, videos and tweets, even providing analytics to track interest on various topics. Another feature is the ability to make a digital album of your links for sharing on Twitter or Facebook. FUSE Labs contends the search experience should include the capture and rebroadcast of what you find while searching and not be a single, goal-oriented experience.

Microsoft’s Bing will soon start showing whether a user’s Facebook friends liked a particular link displayed in its SERPs, a first step toward making traditional search more social. However, Montage is where you can immediately share with friends.