So What is this Searchles Anyway and What’s Different About It??

With the proliferation of social sites – social networking – social bookmarking – social search – social news – and so on – it’s easy to get lumped into a category that isn’t always a good fit.

Last month, Pete Cashmore at Mashable! wondered how we plan to differentiate ourselves from other social bookmarking sites. Is Searchles a social bookmarking site? Yes and no. Is Searchles a social network? No and yes. Is Searchles a social search platform? Yes and yes.

But what does that mean? Simply put, we consider Searchles to be a hybrid, uniquely combining aspects of all three in ways that are unique to any of the approaches we’ve seen by other players in any of those categories. Here are a couple of the big differences:

Searchles is not limited by the “wisdom of crowds” approach. We let users decide who influences their discovery, when, and how through networks of trust. We’re unaware of any other player in either the social bookmarking or social search space taking that approach.

Network search enables users to discover content with personalized filtering features that include tags, keywords or a combination of both, 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, relevant results while suggesting content and people related to each user’s interests.

The other big difference is that our search technology is completely proprietary. That isn’t true of the other players in the social search space. What does that mean? Without access to the underlying proprietary algorithms, you can reorder results but you can’t modify the results or apply any kind of scoring technique to influence relevancy in the same way that you can with network search.

We know this is kind of confusing to explain or digest. If you have questions or ideas on how, feel free to share them here and I’ll do a follow up post. Also, you may want to take a look at this Searchles review at SEO Chat that does a good job of summing up how the site works or this interview at Search Engine Lowdown that expands on the limits of collective wisdom. More later…


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