New User Recognition Features at Searchles

If you’ve spent any time on Searchles yesterday or today, you may have also noticed that the homepage is different. Not bad, eh?

Top Groups and Top People are now front and center on the homepage. Below them are the most recently posted links on the site – nothing different about that. Your two most recent posts will always make it to the homepage – we are an equal opportunity social search site (except for spammers).

We made the changes because Searchles really revolves around the groups you create and the people you connect to (your collaborative “trust networks”) – NOT the homepage or any one link. So we wanted to emphasize that while also providing a way of recognizing influential community members and groups.

Top Group and Top People rankings were developed using proprietary kick-ass algorithms that analyze the network of people you are connected to and the content you and they are submitting. We don’t simply count up your friends and declare you the winner. We use an advanced iterative analysis of the interconnections between people to figure out who the most respected people are. As it turns out, Math is indeed good for something.

We’ll continue to tweak the algorithms, we expect that some of you will have fun testing or trying to game them, but at the end of the day, we hope you’ll tell us how you want these recognition features to evolve and expand.

Last but not least, someone, somewhere in the blogosphere will surely bring it up so I’ll address it now. We’ve been talking about how to do this since November long before Digg made it’s decision to eliminate the Top Digger list. While we admire the growth and traction of sites like Digg and Netscape, our business models are different.

It’s never been about the homepage at Searchles – we see the homepage as just a starting point for discovery and interaction. Bottom line is it’s all about you and your trusted network however you want to define that. Let us know. If you’ll come by and stay a while, we’ll build it.

dumbfounder