Delving into a New Approach to Search
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Before the Internet and search engines, we used a number of different ways to find information. And we still do; who hasn’t asked their friends for advice about a trip or a purchase? Delver, a search engine start-up based in Israel, hopes to update that practice with a Web 2.0 twist.
The way Delver sees it, there are two basic problems with search the way it is today. The first problem is that you could be a dog or the President of the United States, and you’d still get the same results from a search engine if you both put in the same keyword. Or, to put it a different way, a sixty-five-year-old history professor searching for “Goth bands” probably won’t be looking for the same kinds of results as his fifteen-year-old granddaughter, but they’ll both get the same results anyway. Delver thinks this approach is a mistake.
The second problem is that, not only do most search engines not know who you are; they don’t know who your friends are either. Since they can’t see your “social graph,” as it’s coming to be called, they can’t tell whether your friends might know something that’s relevant to your search query. Delver thinks that, if you’re searching for “New York,” you might want to see blog posts and YouTube videos and such from friends that are about or mention New York.
If Delver can make the technology work, TechCrunch notes, it could add real value to online social networks, “because, let’s face it, social networking doesn’t offer much functional value beyond allowing people to connect with one another.” Unfortunately, Delver won’t be entering beta until March, and it will be a private beta at that. But we can take a look at what the would-be search engine has revealed about itself so far.
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