While I have not participated much in social search, I am exploring several social search services. I recently signed up at searchles (social search site). I am quite impressed with the community there.

I happened on searchles by accident and I am glad that I did, because I do believe that Searchles has something unique in the social search niche.

Searchles is a social search platform that incorporates several aspects of social networking, showcases members expertise, and social bookmarking all rolled into one service.

Users influence social search results and what they determine is relevant. The higher an item is ranked the more likely the item will appear on the front page and in discussion groups. People powered recommended search has begun to gain momentum in the search industry. Sites such as Mahalo and Searchles are rising on the incoming wave of social search and do a better job of it that say Yahoo or Google.

However, both Yahoo and Google have begun to incorporate social search into their engines. Google has begun incorporating StumbleUpon results into its index and Yahoo has begun to allow users to modify their own listings in the Yahoo search index (or so I have been told). Yahoo also purchased del.icio.us several years ago, but has not done much to improve the bookmarking service to date.

I believe there is a clear line to be drawn between human powered (recommendation) search and social search. While both ideas are very similar in regards to outside users affecting the results and information in the indexes. Social search encourages discussion, discovery and interaction with other users on a more personal level. There is a two-conversation going on social search sites, where on human powered search much of the communication is still one-way (to visitors).

As I have said many times human beings are social ‘animals’ and services that provide a deeper two-way communication and group discussions are going to popular and successful. Visitors and users alike want to be part of the discussion. Unlike television, radio and other forms of mass communication where dialog is pushed at the viewer and does not allow for reciprocal communication (same thing on most search engines, currently).

Back to Searchles for a moment

I signed up a couple of days ago and installed the bookmarklet to add sites to “my searchles” page. I initially submitted 6 or 8 items to get a feel for how the site worked and to see firsthand what would happen after submission. I would say that about two hours later I received several email notifications that other Searchles members had added several of my submissions to groups on the site. Mind you, I signed up for three groups relating to social media. However, the new group additions where other than the ones I joined. That is what I call community spirit. I have only experienced such friendliness on two other social sites in the past, namely on Mixx (social news) and StumbleUpon (social bookmarking). This kind of community support for a service is what makes site popular with users. Searchles is going places, like the top of the social search niche, bet on that.

Let’s face it online socialization is here and ‘we’ want more of it.

Related

'Social' search engines replace computer results with human recommendations
(USA Today 2006)

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