An early version of the social search site goes public.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
By Erica Naone
The social search site Delver,
first announced earlier this year at DEMO,
is publicly launching an early version of its search engine today. From Technology Review's earlier
coverage of the site:
Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site connects
information about a user's social network with Web search results, "so you
are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph." He explains
that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name. Delver then
crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the
user--such as a public LinkedIn
profile--and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based
on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to,
produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority.
Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as
those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college
as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the
bottom. The consequence, says Agmon, is that each user gets a different set of
results from a given query, and a set quite different from those delivered by Google.
In the released version, users can link Delver to profiles
stored on MySpace, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn,
YouTube, hi5,
FriendFeed, Digg,
and Del.icio.us. The company says that it
plans to add support for other social sites in coming months. To build out a
profile further, a user can enter details such as profession, education, and
location. Users can also connect to people on Delver who bring up interesting
search results.
In my experiments with the early version, I found that my
personal network alone didn't produce enough results to make the service
useful. It seems that early adopters will need to focus on building up
connections to other Delver users, or perhaps to bloggers who tend to write
about topics of interest to them. I continue to think that Delver is an
interesting idea, and I look forward to seeing what the site looks like once
it's collected more social data about its users.
