The trend of searching your social network for information is going to be with us for a while. Facebook is clearly interested in improving its own search engine to provide a relevant social graph for each individual. And others in this space include Search Wikia, Rollyo (search sites you trust) and Eureskster (customize a search a topic, and share and distribute the social search widget). In the UK, new startup RecommendBox is taking a different approach - building a database of searchable recommendations in a private network. Evernote (US) and Spheers (UK) are yet more attempts at this.
The latest entrant to this space is Nsyght a boostrapped UK startup now in public Beta which launched a low-level Alpha back in October. Nsyght wants to take your bookmarks and social network and use those to create more relevant search results.
The site features ‘Social Network Portability’ (xfn+hcard) support, so users can import their profile and friends data from digg, last.fm, twitter, and pownce. Users can also import or export to del.icio.us or ma.gnolia and simpy.
Try a search on “iPhone development” across Wikia, Nsyght and Google. Nsyght comes off pretty well - and they don’t have anywhere close to Wikia’s funding.
The new public beta has a clean, Google-esque interface and a number of new features like Tag support and integration with the new Clickpass service. I’d say this is still a site for geeks/early adopters, but definitely one to watch. There’s a longer review on TechCrunch UK.
You should check http://WWW.VISVO.COM out…
Some amazing work for a bootstrap company - they’ve achieved a great deal with no outside resources based on having a solid idea back by serious development. Hope they get funded soon so we get to really see what their platform/engine can do.
I am excited about this concept and want to see more. I like the idea of trusting my own searches and my friends searches instead of random suggestions in the thousands.
@Blake: How is this related to Visvo? I don’t think it is…. I believe Visvo is simply a general (but small) web search engine built on top of Nutch, no?
Ah, Simpy support, that’s good to see!
This is great. But there’s a sector where social search can really shine: within the Enterprise. Expecting some significant moves there. Do you know of any players in that area ?
All of these sites lack a full crawl of the web to fill in the cracks. Check out:
http://www.iprecis.com
Full disclosure I am the builder of this site.
Nsyght is actually a pretty great site. I have been using it for awhile now, cool to see it featured on TC. Hope they get funded soon because I can see how this concept could explode with some backing behind it.
Love the integration with clickpass. Only reason I tried itout.
Well if the article mentions WIKIA then why not VISVO, both are built on nutch and integrate social networking…btw, I found the thread on Visvo through wikia…
If you haven’t noticed, “Search” has been getting worse. The main player, Google search engine seems majorly out of whack. Just simply entering in “quotes” for a specific phrase you are looking for, provides just tons of results from Blogs or Digg like sites & widgets for only “HALF” of the words you may be searching for. In addition, you get tons of results of re-hashed information due to sites taking content & regurgitating it. Don’t believe me?
Take this example & place in “ANY” of the search engines:
“How to develop a social network” or
“Steps to develop a social network” or
“Develop a social network from scratch” or
“how to code or program a social network”
You will get results that feature exactly what you “DON”T WANT”, for example, you will get: “SITES” that offer you a white label solution or results that send you to Ning or Kickapps, and the “other 9 networks that let you ‘build’ a network off an existing platform. These results are fine, however, really don’t provide the specific solution one could be looking for. I literally spent 8 hours trying to find out specific results. All I was trying to look for was the basic steps or what’s needed to develop a social network right from the beginning. No white label solutions, just the details of and specs from the beginning. Maybe someone here can help?
But really, try some of those search queries versus “iPhone Development”. However, iPhone Development search means to me that search results at least should give me the specific details on at least: 1.)How To, 2.) News Results, 3.) Company details, and then Blogs. Maybe a category type search engine should be in the works eh?
@Dez. The problem is there is simply too much data for a machine to make sense of. Establishing relevancy for a set of keywords across billions of pages is just too complex for any algorithm alone, you need that human factor.
We all have different concepts of relevancy. Take your first example, “How to develop a social network”, what if the person was business oriented? They would feel that a result from Ning would be very relevant. What if the person was marketing oriented? They may have used the word “develop” to describe developing or building an audience for a social network, so finding a result about the technical side would be poor for them.
The majors have to play generic to cater for everyone. Smaller plays like us can afford to experiment. I for one, am not ashamed of not delivering a result for a search instead of delivering results that only fit half your query.