Two big trends in search right now are semantic and social search. Worio, a startup in Vancouver, BC, is combining the two approaches today by tapping its semantic search engine into Facebook Connect. The fundamental technology behind Worio is a semantic tagging system that analyzes the content of indexed Web pages and categorizes them automatically based on what it can glean about the meaning of the text. It provides both normal search results and a discovery feed based on the tags. Search results can be saved in a library of links.
Now, with the Facebook Connect implementation, which just went live a few minutes ago, Worio can tap into your profile, your friends, and your feed to further personalize search results. Worio actually indexes your profile and feed. Any time somebody shares a link on your feed, the entire page gets analyzed and tagged by Worio, and added to its index (which currently is made up of about 100 million pages, culled down from one billion found by its crawler). Worio is less concerned with quantity than quality, as far as its index is concerned, and adding links recommended by friends is a really good filter for quality links.
Once you sign into Worio via Facebook Connect, it takes a few minutes to index your profile. From then on, any search you do will be influenced by your profile, links your friends share on Facebook, and the semantic tags that Worio associates with you and your friends. For instance, when I search for “restaurants,” Worio figures out that I live in New York and peppers some results specific to New York City in my discovery feed results even though I didn’t put “New York” in the search box.
The discovery fed on the side is divided into several boxes, with the associated tags shown on top, so that you can see how Worio is categorizing the search. The links in the discovery boxes change with each refresh and act like Stumbleupon links—each one has some level of pre-qualified goodness or interestingness. It would be nice if you could click on each tag to further refine the search, but that capability is not turned on yet.
When you click through to a Webpage, a Worio box hovers in the top right allowing you to rate the page with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, save it to your Worio bookmark library, or share it. When you click save, the box expands ti show you all the tags Worio associates withe the page, and lets you add your own. In this sense it is like Delcious on steroids. The auto-tagging is a really nice feature and is surprisingly accurate. Links can be made public, viewable only by your friends, or private. Pages can also be shared via both e-mail or Facebook.
What is interesting about Worio and other search startups tapping into Facebook Connect such as Q&A service Aardvark is that they don’t even need a Facebook app to make their services more socially-aware. Worio is working on a Facebook app which will make the discovery feed available inside Facebook, but it doesn’t need that to improve its results.
Worio is trying to train people to conduct a different type of search, one that is more serendipitous. It falls under the vague category of “discovery,” a term of art that has failed to catch on because it can mean so many different things. But if Worio is about discovery, then it should put its discovery feed front and center instead of off to the side. If I want regular search results, I already know where to go for those.
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and http://www.yocial.com too
http://www.monitor.hr
you are a quite obviously a spammer.
Congrats to the Worio Team,
I’ve been using the site for the past few months, but the facebook connect was a needed move.
At first glance most people would probably just go “oh good, another search engine”, but the right hand columns of discovery recommendations is actually quite good, and I only expect it to get better.
Lots of great stuff coming out of BC these days.
Yes please.
Good job Team Wario
This looks like a really useful implementation of social search.
unfortunately, if you have the opera browser, the facebook connect feature is not usable (button is not visible)
Firefox seems to work though.
Please fix!
I dealt with the same issue with my site as I’ve added social discovery for live music events.
Unfortunately, Worio (or http://www.HearWhere.com for that matter) can actually do anything about this.
If you are using Opera, you have to set the browser to work as FF or another browser. I forget exactly how to do this.
Contact Facebook, it’s really there issue, not Worio’s.
What information does it pull back to the newsfeed?
This is stupid.
Let’s say that an average person has 300 friends. (note, a publisher who uses Facebook to broadcast to 5,000 is not an average user). I’m interested in Pinot Noir and one of my friends happens to post a link about Pinot Noir. What are the chances of that happening? What does it matter if one or two friends prefer one brand over another? Did their link signal preference or just general sharing?
I’m also interested in thousands of other subjects. For each, my 300 friends contain expertise on each?
Ugh! Sorry to be so harsh!
I think the idea is that from just a link or 2 posted about pinot noir, Worio would deduce that you are interested in red wine, not just a particular brand or variety. Also, you don’t need to have friends interested in everything you’re interested in, since Worio just uses your friends postings, profiles, etc. as additional data to include in its recommendation process. This influences the returned recommendations, but is in addition to data gleaned from your own profile, search topics, tagged pages, etc.
It would be good to see the direction of Social Search. Good Luck to the Worio team.
Wario, move to The Valley if you need more funding.
As some of the commenters have pointed out, it’s an open question on how the data contained in one’s social graph should be weighted in a relevancy algorithm, but it’s tough to think of scenarios where one wouldn’t want to have it at all. Coupled with semantic capabilities, we think that it can be very powerful.
Bill
http://twitterjobsearch.com
Nice post! Also check out my blog/podcast at http://macmaniapodcast.com.
funny that there seems to be no social or semantic service yet able to identify such spam. kind of a touring test for the transition between web2 and web3 ?
Cool site. Will be interesting to see if it catches on with people.
oky saolun