Looking back on what became a tough end to a tough year for the retail sector, the one bright spot was the online sector. Shoppers whipped out their plastic at a record rate on Black Friday, a trend that continued throughout the season.

The Amazon (AMZN) Kindle killed the competition, reinforcing the status of the online channel as the future of the retail business. Social media, in particular, had its first real test this year, as many companies -- including Best Buy (BBY), JCPenney (JCP) and Target (TGT) -- used the likes of Twitter and Facebook to engage customers, publicize sales and generally increase revenue. The next stage in the evolution, of course, is to use shopping behavior to trigger viral results.

Just the sentence "Google will soon be irrelevant" is sure to set off a firestorm of conversation and arguments. The company's death grip on the information most of us rely on daily to function in the internet age is well-known, and Google, Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) brand has managed to infiltrate so many areas so quickly it's mind-boggling. But, the company's inability to adapt quickly to the soaring popularity of social search (think Facebook and Mahalo, a new 'human-powered' search engine) may be its popularity downfall, according to well-known blogger Robert Scoble.

Will Google's automatically-generated search results and website indexing practices be overtaken by the ability of real people to produce similar chunks of information that are more personally relevant? It's hard to imagine that happening any time soon due to Google's enormous popularity and usage from billions of web surfers every year. Just like any commodity, customers eventually prefer more customized and personalized result, and web usage will be no different. But make no mistake -- Google is working feverishly to ensure its bread-n-butter search engine becomes as personally attached to each Google customer as possible. Is that enough?

Scoble does put forth an interesting question: what is the future of search? Will it be using a mobile phone or PC to find things we're looking for in the most local and personal way possible by means of highly relevant search results? That would be the easy answer based on the natural evolution of the way many of us use internet search today. That doesn't make it guaranteed, though -- and whoever discovers the "next version of search" could indeed threaten Google. Then again, Google's brand will be incredibly hard to dethrone, just like any entrenched household name.

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) owns the index to the world's knowledge. What it isn't good at, however, is telling us which sources are well-written, amusing, or authoritative, especially since a whole industry has evolved to help businesses game the system by pushing their links to the top of the list regardless of appropriateness.

What we net users need is a curator, someone to cull out the crap, spam and marketing spin, leaving only the best answers to our question. This is the role the new search site Mahalo, just launched by internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, intends to provide.

Unlike sites such as Digg, which aggregate visitor opinion to vett interesting web content (and whose results are frequently gamed), Mahalo uses a staff of real human professional guides. These guides take the most popular search terms du jour and compile a prioritized list of resources that best address them.

Obviously, indexing even a small part of all possible search terms by hand is impossible, I asked Calacanis what Mahalo's goals were in this respect. He replied, "We are setting the goal of the top 10,000 terms by the end of the year and the top 25,000 next year." He pointed out that the number of unique search terms used every day is hugely inflated because people frame the same question in so many different ways. "If you come to our iPod or flatpanel TV pages, you don't have to do the 10 secondary searches. That being said, our goal is to do the fat part of the long tail and leave the other 60-90% of the tail to Google--which is why we show Google when we don't have a hand-written page."