Niche Search Part II: Social Search on a Tangent
Social
search is still in unmarked territory, as no single winner has been
crowned for their attempts with semantics, online behavior, and human
power. But there are those out there that are determined to make it
happen, and I very much enjoy exploring new ways to search and
discover, based on a number of associations brought about by every new
technique that emerges. Here is Part II of the Niche Search series,
profiling Prefound and Searchbots .
Read Part I here.
Prefound
Prefound
is a site that has amassed its users searches and provides their
previous experience to help your new search flourish. It's a
human-powered search in the sense that it relies on the community to
organize search results on a given query. They are basing your search
on other's experience to give you something more relevant than a
crawler can find. Until technology has formed an artificial
intelligence to match that of human intellect, human-influenced
experience will continue to drive many in the social search realm.
Searchbots
Searchbots
has been a project (work in progress) for some time now, and has taken
the act of search and turned it into a bit of a game. Your Searchbot
is a personal buddy that will tailor its search results to fit your
needs. It's dynamic in its interactions, so the more information you
feed it, the more relevant your search results become. The bot's
battery life will actually get low if you don't feed it with more
info! You can search by mood, color, keyword, and all sorts of
things. The search becomes tangential in this regard, as it
incorporates a bit of StumbleUpon tactics and betters its results based
on your reaction to a given website it has provided. Not to mention,
you can customize the look of your little Searchbot.
