Welcome Mashable! Readers

Pete Cashmore over at Mashable! just posted a review on Searchles. Thanks Pete! But Pete didn’t install the widget so you’re probably wondering more about how it works.

If you’re not registered at Searchles, you can still use the widget to view related content by scrolling your mouse over the tags below. It’s a pretty cool feature. You can also view all the other content within the widget.

But if you want to bookmark, tag, comment or share the link with your friends, you do need to register at Searchles. This is standard with all social bookmarking services – del.icio.us and digg included – it prevents spam – and is standard on most comment forms on other websites for the same reasons. But we’ll definitely look at ways to bring registration into the widget for the next version.

Our goal with this widget was to do exactly what Pete suggested – help bloggers and other online media keep your audiences on your websites. We think that’s where they belong. When the widget is installed on your website, when your audience scrolls over the tags, they will see related content biased to your website – stuff they may not have found otherwise.

Feel free to leave ideas and suggestions for how we can improve either here or at Mashable. Thanks again Pete for the mention!

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Searchles Releases the First Integrated Widget That Pushes and Pulls Content

Yesterday we gave our user community a sneak preview of Searchles' new widget. Today we’re telling everyone else about it. Congratulations to Chris and the entire development team for a job well done!

We also want to thank the Searchles user community for helping us test drive the widget yesterday. You helped us catch a big bug and fix it before we rolled out today. Thank you!

If this is your first time visiting the blog, please take a moment and review our recent posts where you can learn more about the widget – that little gray box at the end of this post. Register at Searchles, try using it on the blog, and let us know what you think. Better yet, get the widget now for your own site!

Caveman(aka Elias Shams, CEO)

Ok, We had a bug with the new widget, but it's fixed now...

There was a pretty big bug that made it so you couldn't see the widget unless you were logged in. So if you came to the blog in between about Noon and 5:40pm today (EST) and you weren't logged into Searchles, then you couldn't actually see the widget... OOOPS.

Thanks to Declan for pointing that out...

It is fixed now. Enjoy!

But if you notice anything else funky, please drop us an email at info (at) searchles.com.



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Searchles Rolls-Out the Wise and Wicked Push-me/Pull-me Widget – If You’re Reading This at Searchles, You Know About it First!

Today we’re quietly launching what we think is a very cool widget. If you have a blog or website, our widget helps keeps web traffic where it should be – on your site. Tomorrow we tell the masses about it.

For all things worth praising, one of the big complaints we’ve heard about social sites is that they marginalize original content by disconnecting the audience dialogue from the source. We thought we could fix that with a viral widget that would enhance the interactive experience for your site visitors and help attract new visitors to your site at the same time.

Some of the key features:

• With the widget installed, your visitors never leave your website to bookmark, tag, share, group or comment on content. (Requires user registration at Searchles)
• Your content, tags and comments are automatically “pushed” into Searchles just as tags and comments at Searchles itself are automatically “pulled” back to your site – viewable instantly in both places.
• Users can receive notifications to automatically know when another user has replied to their comments and are prompted to return.
• By scrolling over the tags within the widget, Searchles automatically recommends related content at your site and elsewhere on the web. (No registration required)
• Our widget doesn’t hog valuable site real estate – it integrates very unobtrusively at the bottom of the page, collapsing and expanding within your site as the user interacts.
• It’s also easy to install with just one line of code, and easy and intuitive to use.

See that little gray box at the end of this post? That’s the widget. You can take it for a test drive here, or you can be one of the first to get the Searchles widget and take it for a test drive on your own site. Whether you test drive it here or install it on your own site, tell us about it here. What do you like and how can we improve it? More innovations coming soon…….

dumbfounder

Searchles Officially Official Blog Debuts – If You’re Reading This at Searchles, You Know About it First!

Today Searchles quietly launched our official blog in conjunction with the launch of our new “wise and wicked push me/pull me widget.” Tomorrow, we tell the masses about it.

Why yet another social blog? Because our community of users is growing, you have great ideas, and we wanted to create a forum for discussing them and keeping you in the loop on what we’re thinking about doing next.

Have a good idea or think we can do something better? Share it here.

Want to ask a question about something you read somewhere else? We’ve created a group at Searchles called Searchles Mindshare. Join the group, post the link, ask your question or make a comment and we’ll respond.

Oh and where’s that widget we’re talking about? See that gray box just below this post? That’s it. Check it out and use it to tell us what you think.

dumbfounder

Hint: you have to be registered at Searchles first.

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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