Delver Reinvents Search
The most impressive thing about the new search engine Delver is that it knows who you are and who
your friends are even if you don't import your address book or add your social
networking profiles. Instead, Delver leverages the social graph to map out a
user's social connections. Since everyone's social graph is unique, like a
fingerprint, the same query will yield vastly different results for each user.
The results are more personal and meaningful to users than a generic search
using "normal" search engine.But don't call Delver a "social search engine."
"That name belongs to services like Mahalo," says Liad Agmon, Delver CEO. "We prefer the term 'socially connected search engine'." That term makes sense because Delver is not a social network built around a search engine, but a search engine who indexes and queries your social network to deliver its results. Instead of just looking at a web site's popularity, Delver looks at information like whether your friends have tagged the site or if it's found on their social network profiles, bookmarking sites, photos and video sharing sites, or on their blogs. The results are more relevant because they account for who a person is and what they find valuable.
Agmon adds, "People want trusted information from their friends, but may not know who in their network is knowledgeable about a given topic. We make Web search more fun and meaningful by prioritizing results based on a user's network, while enabling the user to discover others in their extended network who share common interests."
Even without registering for an account, Delver will try to determine who you are by searching any public social network profiles you may have on sites like Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube. If you do decide to register on the site, though, you can then choose to associate your accounts with Delver in order to obtain even more accurate results. Delver currently indexes the entire web, and specifically indexes people's social connections on flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, hi5, facebook, Blogger, and, they are adding more all the time. When they go into public beta (circa May, 2008), an optional email import process will be provided as well.
Maximizing Your "Whole" Social Network
Many of us have friends, family members, or colleagues on sites like MySpace and facebook who aren't into using all the latest and greatest web apps and technologies. These friends may have a MySpace profile or a blog, but without visiting these sites directly, there was no way to gather information from these people before. Now with Delver, their profiles and contributions to your social graph are indexed.
No one has to sign up for Delver for you to have them included in your search results.
This is a real breakthrough since prior to Delver, the maximum value you would get out of social networks was directly related to how many of your friends would join. I don't know about you, but I still have plenty of friends who are on MySpace and nothing else, and are quite content with that. With each new social network I joined, the number of my non-tech friends that would follow me dwindled down to nearly nothing. Now it doesn't matter. They can stay on MySpace forever and yet the content they create there will be valuable to me.
Privacy Concerns?
It's important to understand that Delver doesn't display anything that isn't already publicly available. "If Google can get to it, so can Delver," says Agmon. But Delver just makes it so much easier to do so. You can access people's social information with such ease that anyone who hasn't been good about setting their profiles to "private" (or who doesn't know to do so), may be surprised to find themselves searchable on Delver.
Using Delver
After claiming your identity in Delver, your social graph is mapped and displayed for you beneath the Delver search box. Dotted lines connect you to your friends and your "friends of friends."
When you perform a query, results from all over your social web display.
You can narrow down your search to just display the people related to your search term or just media results by clicking the links at the top.
Each search result displays, via a breadcrumb trail, your relationship to
the person associated with that result. You can hover your mouse over their name
to see their photo and their relationship to you. Even if you and them are not
directly related as "friends" on a social network, you can still click the plus
sign beneath their picture to add them as a connection. This will then add them
into the mix of your search results in the future. This way, you can view the
relevant bookmarks, links, blog posts, photos, and videos of people like you
even if you don't know them personally...and they don't have to confirm the
connection on their end.
Alternately, you can choose to exclude certain connections from your search results as well, which is perfect for eliminating those "who-is-that-guy?" friendships left over from your days of MySpace friend accumulation contests.
When Will It Arrive?
Delver is headquartered in Herzliya, Israel and will officially open U.S. offices in Silicon Valley in spring of 2008. Having just premiered at DEMO, Delver won't be in beta until March. Those interested in being included in the private beta can sign up for an invite on the Delver home page.1 TrackBacks
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Personally I'm a bit skeptical of the value here. For one, how is it going to index private data? Data on most of my Facebook friends is inaccessible (unless it uses the Facebook Platform, but it can't store such data), and many MySpace users keep their profiles private.
Second, if friends aren't using the latest and greatest web apps (like many of my friends), how is indexing a person's MySpace going to do much in terms of improving search results?
Besides, most of the time I do use a search engine, I'm looking for specific information on a problem, event, piece of media, etc. My searching tends to be very targeted and usually would not be helped by the input of friends... at least I don't see how it would be helped.
Sometimes I get the feeling that "social" is the new black among web applications... not everything has to have a social aspect. For me, a search engine is one app that doesn't need a social aspect.
"The most impressive thing about the new search engine Delver is that it knows who you are and who your friends are even if you don't import your address book or add your social networking profiles. Instead, Delver leverages the social graph to map out a user's social connections."
How? Is this going to use Google's new Social Graph API?
http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/
It seems like this site would have to crawl the social networks data to be able to accomplish this. Isn't this a violation of terms? The reason I ask is because i can think of a ton of great ideas, assuming I'm allowed to do it, I've just always assumed I can't.
It will be interesting if Yahoo's MyWeb/Delicious respond to it by putting a extra search button saying "Search in your network"
And remember, delicious has got huge data.
'search engine who indexes and queries your social network'?
personally I think it is not a search engine. what I will search in between my 'social network', between my friends, pals, and so on?