Looking for the Social Currency in Search

Linkedin's recent marketing activity got me thinking again about search and social.
In recent headlines you'll read:

• Facebook and Bing’s Plan to Make Search Social
• Search me
• What should Google do about Facebook Graph Search?

Everyone is trying to figure out how to make search more social. I think whats missing is a metric, something similar to "likes" or "follows" that will drive people to share from search, because they get some value in return.

Whether you agree or not, in the mind of users "likes" and "follows" are today's social currency, the more the better. Even though big search engines have already embedded sharing functionality in their SERPs, being able to share doesn't mean that people will share. Why should they, what's in it for them? How does search increase their self-worth? What emotional rewards or visible rewards do they receive?

Most people on social networks  don't produce content, instead they synthesize and curate content. A few years back Bradley Horowitz's posted the content production pyramid. It still holds true today.

In order to make search more social, we need to allow for synthesis to take place on search page. I'm certain that posting to social networks or pulling in data from social networks on SERPs is a not the right way to approach this.

We need a social currency that is native to search.