Social search—the theory being that you put a focusing lens on your query by searching the internet through a social net that matches you and your specific interests. Delver, a new alpha from Israel that just came out 2 days ago, is trying to do just that.

“Delver is designed to ‘delve’ into your online social graph to generate search results gathered from your friends, your network and your friends’ networks, to help you find information more relevant to you as an individual,” said Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver. “We prioritize results based on your network to make Web search more fun and meaningful, while enabling you to discover others in your extended network who share common interests.”

Delver has some interesting takes on the advantages of such a search. For example one of their goals is that a search for Surfing in Hawaii would reveal who in your social world has posted images and videos from their recent surfing trip – as opposed to getting an annoying list of advertisements from the traditional search engines. Plus, says Delver’s website, “who knows… you may just find out your best friend’s hot roommate recently surfed there, and now you’ve got the perfect conversation starter!” That could be interesting.

Before you do your first “delve,” Delver has you type your name in, and it then allows you to pick yourself out of the many on the planet who share your full name. Then you can plug your various profiles into it and it gets a picture of your network, your interests, and a good outline of your web presence, from the following sites:

The information Delver finds on social networking profiles, blogs, bookmarks, photo and video-sharing sites is cross-linked to the searcher’s “social graph,” which is built as information is found. Since every person’s social graph is unique, the same Delver query will produce significantly different results for each person—as reflected through the collective experiences of each person’s contacts.

Delver also gives users the ability to tap into the content and network of people whose opinion they value by adding them as ‘Search Buddies’. It prioritizes results from ‘Search Buddies’ and their network as if they were the users’ friends. Delver also provides a number of features for organizing and retaining the information found as a result of a search query. When results are yielded, user’s may choose the “keep it” option, which stores the selected links in the appropriate categories for compiling lists or easier reference later on.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 9:55 am and is filed under Guest Authors, Newcomers, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.