I believe the internet is going to replace word of mouth. I still rely on others’ opinions and expertise, however I do this via searching the internet. The problem is that Google’s clever searching algorithms still can’t compete with the enormous amount of information present. What we really need is to augment Google’s searching technology with the wisdom of the crowds. Who would have believed that the Wikipedia idea could actually work in reality? But it does, and works really well. Now take a look at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, people are still better than computers at performing simple tasks such as categorizing images. Why not try the same approach for reorganizing search results? Who can judge better than you whether that site has the information that you need or not…