Searchles, the intelligent social search and social networking platform that gets smarter every time you use it — just launched a free related content widget for bloggers and web publishers as the first phase in the rollout of the Searchles Discovery Widget platform. This self-serve open platform will be expanding in the upcoming weeks to offer a larger set of social widgets that leverage the content and on-site activities of and conversations between a site’s users to identify and surface relationships between pieces of content and relationships between like-minded users or groups of users.

“In 2008 we saw big media sites and smaller publishers adding social networking features — encouraging their readers to interact with the content,” said Chris Seline, CTO and Founder of Searchles. “Building upon this web 2.0 concept, our goal with the full launch of our open platform widgets is to let publishers take advantage of and monetize the rich social layers users have added to their site content — the tags, user-profiles, user-groups, forum posts, etc. For web users, our widgets offer readers a portal through which to explore all the elements of online community they’ve created.”

The open platform’s initial related content widget is pre-packaged with ads and operates within any site or blog-hosting service. It will display a site’s contextually relevant content on article pages to engage readers with options for further exploration, increase page views and generate incremental revenue for web publishers and bloggers. Publishers need only sign up with an email address and grab a piece of code to embed in the site to have the widget up and running in minutes.

The search technology powering the open platform and the related content widget goes beyond basic tag-matching and text search. Relevancy is determined by crawling a site’s content and analyzing relationships between extracted concepts in order to retrieve the most comprehensive set of relevant posts in your site’s archive or related users within your site’s interactive community. With the launch of the related content widget and the upcoming suite of social widgets to launch over the coming weeks within the Searchles Discovery Widgets platform, Searchles plans to play an integral role in the movement towards what is known as the “contextual web” — a built-in personal and contextual relevance to the content you discover and consume through your interactions on the web.

Search + Circles = Searchles is a highly scaleable “social search” platform that showcases expertise, enables collaboration with peers and instantly captures it in searchable knowledge indexes. The platform is a hybrid, combining aspects of “social bookmarking” and “social networking” technology with analytical “social search” capability to allow for network search.

Network search enables users to discover content with personalized filtering features that include tags and keywords, as well as the ability to apply these same filters to search all postings, groups, friends, or friends’ friends based on each user’s personal criteria. By analyzing the associations and patterns between trusted people, sources, tags and content, Searchles is able to deliver more precise results while suggesting relevant content and people as well.

The proprietary technology behind Searchles is an evolution of the search engine Dumbfind, developed by veteran search technologist and Searchles’ founder and CTO Chris Seline. Both brands are wholly-owned by Searchles, Inc., a privately-held company based in Washington, D.C. backed by angel investors

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Innovations, Verticals. 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.