Me.dium.com has taken a different tack. We have a full web index, but we change the results based on the surfing activity of our user base (now over 2,000,000).
The searching activity data is gathered using the Me.dium search toolbar. Obviously, you don't have to install it yourself unless you actually want to become part of the crowd - but with this new "Power to the People" philosophy, it's being part of the crowd that empowers you as an individual surfer. Based on the tutorial, it seemed a little too invasive (teenager-ish?) for me: you can see which of your friends are online, what they are currently viewing, chat with them, etc. and, even if the feature can be disabled, I am not sure I want to share that amount of intimacy with my friends when at work or at home. But it's probably just one of those things I will change my mind about as more and more people choose to use it.
We all know Web 2.0 really is all about 'social': social networking, social bookmarking, social learning, you name it, it has social in front of it. Well, this new engine brings 'social' to the search industry.
When you use social search, you get extra information for every link in your result set:
- crowd rank: not sure how this works, perhaps there is a rank button on the toolbar, a bit like the Google page rank (?);
- velocity: whether site traffic from the crowd is stable, increasing or decreasing;
- recent activity: how 'hot' the site is (luke-warm, warm, hot);
- visitors present: whether anyone from the crowd is currently visiting;
- average visit duration: "short", "medium" or "long" (?);
- navigate from and to: how most of the crowd moves to or from the link.
So you actually get quite a lot of additional information about each search result.
It will be interesting to see in what way the search results are influenced by the crowd, I guess it could (hypothetically) lead to all sorts of biases, but also to a good way of measuring what most people are interested in or in fact (want to) believe.
I couldn't help but wonder whether the propagandists could get hold of this, but I get the feeling that's a typical Web-2.0 non-argument. A bit like the kind of argument you may have against corporate wikis/forums/blogs. The top 'guys' always have the gut feeling the system will be used and abused whereas in actual fact, the vast majority of people are pretty level-headed and once they get the hang of the system actually use it in constructive ways. It seems to me that the more people use this system, the better the results will be and the lesser the impact of small groups of people who may want to sway the search results one way or another.
And there is always the Yahoo-based standard search to fall back on if you are not getting what you want.
There were a couple of minor things I noted when using the search engine.
There was one feature I really missed: the word suggestions. For instance, I wasn't quite sure how to spell Musharraf so guessed at Musharaf, I was expecting the search engine to automatically suggest the correct spelling - it's a bad habit, but a great feature that most Google users have probably grown used to.
Another thing I found as an avid Googler who doesn't ever press the "I'm feeling lucky" button (shameful I know...), was that using the "I feel social" button really didn't come naturally. I think the location of the button and the use of the word 'feel' set the alarm bells a-ringing in a "don't-click-me" kind of way.
One last thing I felt was missing was the ability to sort the search results by crowd rank, recent activity, average visit duration, etc. as this could certainly increase search relevancy. But I guess there is only so much you can expect from an alpha release especially with this level of stability! :-)
So, Me.dium definitely looks promising, and it's really top-notch: if there were any glitches, I certainly didn't notice them. AND it's bringing something really new to the search market so it's worth staying tuned to see how this project will evolve and whether it can get hold of any significant share of the search market.
Thoughts?
