There is a new social search engine called Delver and it is currently in Alpha phase. If it is barely a search engine, or meta search, that’s not much I can talk about. However, it applied a new technology called social search which offer a way for users to bookmark, or Web, people, media search based on their social graph. If you don’t have any profile in any social network, you won’t notice this wonderful feature. But if you register and link all your profiles, range from MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, to Facebook, you’ll realize the powerful search engine rendered by Delver.
From the profile linking, you can add your own search buddies, that enables you to give priority to results created or referenced by these people. Furthermore, you also can add social circles, which offer a way connect you with people that have something in common with you. Delver will take into consideration on who your friends are and it will return your search queries based the contents that your friends made on Delver as well as what bookmarks they’ve done in the past on Delver. Put simply, Delver can deliver a totally different search results based on your trusted friends you followed on Delver and indexed what they’ve done and their ultimate goal is to recommend your friends’ search results to you completely.
I’d like to share what I thought Delver is good in the practice that it allowed one to easily bookmark certain results with a single click namely “keep it,” the search result you like will instantly save to the right-hand sidebar for your future references. Also, I want to note here after played around it for a while, I knew that its ranking methodology is based on your own social connections, your friends’ quality contents will always be ranked higher than the other search results that based on the keywords you input into the Delver search bar.
This is an interesting way to engage searching the internet. Me.dium on the other hand (http://me.dium.com/search) is processing user’s clickstream data in real-time to create a different lens based on what’s going on now. e.g. do a search for John Edwards on Google or Live, and you get johnedwards.com and wiki/johnedwards. Do the same search on Me.dium and you learn that today people care about his love child, pictures of his mistress, etc.
The difference is real-time (what people are browsing now) vs. historical (what they browsed in the past). Social vs. Old School. Check it out. http://me.dium.com/search.