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Why Search Engines are Failing when it Comes to Collaborative Sites

# Sign-up scams: Sites that a search engine may send you to where you must first sign up and pay, if you want an answer.
# Register: A "road bump" that many sites have, and one Spolsky thinks reduces participation dramatically
# Wrong answers: When searching for highly technical questions, a search engine may send you to a forum that has multiple answers. If you are unsure which answer is the correct one, you waste too much time working through the wrong ones.
# Obsolete results: Google, for instance, will oftentimes give an older page priority. In turn, the page you are served is often outdated and no longer relevant.

The Nine Building Blocks of Social Engineering
# Voting: Copied from Reddit, via Digg, voting allows people to vote up answers they think are good. Stack Overflow tweaked its voting algorithm, giving the person who asked the question special power to select one answer as the official answer that will rise to the top regardless of what the community voted. The second answer, of course is always the highest ranked community answer.
# Tags: Tags allow users to specify perspective. For instance, Spolsky explained, "you can add that I'm asking this from a VB perspective, not a C# perspective." Stack Overflow is also customizable with tags, allowing users to specify which technology they are interested in, and typical of most social sites. What is not typical however, is the ability to ignore tags that Stack Overflow has built in.
# Editing: Taking a page out of Wikipedia, Stack Overflow allows users to edit both questions and answers; so answers could get better, rather than becoming "this frozen artifact on the Internet until the end of time," which is typical of most forum threads.
# Badges: "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon," said Napoleon once upon a time, and so Stack Overflow made the decision to reward its users with badges. Over time, the badges show credibility.
# Karma: People are willing to do

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