A single small website doesn't gather enough data for it to really be meaningful.

If you control the backend for 100,000 online marketers, content creators, bloggers, affiliates and even backend sales data via API or explicit code, it is a totally different ball game, and you can come up with far better suggested links, as Amazon does partially, but they don't have all the data.

If someone searches for a Nikon D90 camera, Google themselves isn't going to suggest a review for an equivalent Canon that is better value. Adwords advertisers might, because either as a human or cross populating keywords it makes sense to bid for competing products, as long as they avoid problems with brand names.

It isn't gaming the system when Ebay collect data from shopping.com epinions.com half.ebay.com and ebay.com, and then heavily interlink them.
It isn't gaming the system when Amazon does the same with IMDB, or I gather from a 2007 press release http://www.dpreview.com, though that relationship isn't clear on the site, they seem to be far less integrated.

The leading search play is important – I tangled a little with Google for 18 months over paid reviews, paid links, employee links, shareholder links and possibly most important, affiliate links, just to narrow the grey area a little.

Ultimately it is possible to give the end user a much better experience after they have left the search engine, or followed a referral link from social media, whilst still guiding them willingly down a path to an informed purchase.

At the same time the earning potential for smaller content creators can be magnified by an order of magnitude.

Thanks for the comment.

The web currently is a competition with each publisher of content looking to earn more page views,a click or a sale, thus navigation between useful resources has deteriorated.

A Google/MSN/Yahoo first query should be enough to get you to a landing page which as well as having relevant content to the query, also contains links that lead you to other content based on multiple probability factors… linguistic, price, value, conversion, social media votes.

The closest example of this is About.com but that is limited to a few hundred subdomains – you could also liken it to the content portfolios of Yahoo, or the way Amazon suggests other purchases.
For information though non-commercial and lacking commerical satisfaction metrics, Wikipedia is similar, and has thus become effectively “tag space”, the default place people link to on any topic.

There isn't a product based equivalent that works, because there needs to be sufficient incentive to cooperate.

Big rock projects however are hard to get off the ground.

In the dark ages I used to rely on people I discovered who had pages of links to stuff that I would find useful and interesting. Now I can trawl the Delicious pages of people I think know something about what I want to know. Doing something with social search and something magical with JSON would be cool. Trusted folk and People-like-us are great filters. I am hoping to talk with CognitiveMatch – who may have some answers.