Social or community powered search has been attempted a number of different ways but Delver, an Israel based startup, looks to leverage users' social graph to create relevant social search results. I got a preview of Delver at DEMO08 and again at the 2008 IsraelWeb Tour. Delver recently launched its open alpha product for all the World to use. Delver offers web, media and people search function. My first impression: Interesting.
Delver looks to:
"...empower you to easily discover and benefit from the collective wisdom of your social world."
Upon signing into Delver a user profile is automatically generated. Users can then tweak their profile by adding additional profiles and other information. Users can then search and the Delver looks at the data in everyones profiles to search for relevant results. Results are categorized by Web, People and Media which each search different types of data. The secret sauce behind the Delver search is not totally clear but its social search approach was explained recently on its blog.
I am curious as to how Delver is able to index from LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook which it uses to assemble a profile that looks a lot like that of MyBlogLog. Delver is interesting because it is able to create an index of somewhat relevant search results just based off of social data. It's a new approach to social search. The only thing I think Delver is missing is a little more profile data accuracy - but it is actually the data not Delver that is at fault. For example, some of the data that Delver pulls in from my profiles is actually outdated just because I rarely go back to a profile, so if something is not correct on profile the search results could be affected but the same thing could happen if a news article were inaccurate and indexed.
Check out Delver and let me know your SOMEWHAT FRANK opinion in the comment section below.
