Delving into a New Approach to Search - Company Background and Technology
(Page 2 of 4 )
Delver is short on the details of its background. Headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, the 20-strong company plans to open U.S. offices in Silicon Valley a little later this year. It has backing from Carmel Ventures, a VC company also based in Israel. Delver CEO Liad Agmon has previously served as the Director of Product Management for McAfee, and was co-founder and CTO of Onigma, a strong competitor in the field of host-based data loss prevention solutions. A regular jack-of-all-trades, Agmon also worked in Israel’s high tech and movie industries. Incidentally, he’s very well-connected on LinkedIn; one can imagine that he uses Delver’s technology every day.
Here’s a screen shot of Delver’s current home page, cropped and reduced a bit to fit:
Delver’s technology has been in the works since 2005. TechCrunch describes it as combining search technologies, semantics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Delver says that it organizes a user’s friends’ tags and information found on social networking profiles, blogs, bookmarks, photos and video sharing sites. When a user searches for information, rather than prioritizing Web results based upon the popularity of particular pages or web sites, Delver ranks information it has organized based on the user’s social connections. Delver points out that every person’s social graph is as unique as a fingerprint – thus, no two people will get exactly the same results.
“People want trusted information from their friends, but may not know who in their network is knowledgeable about a given topic,” Agmon explained. “We make Web search more fun and meaningful by prioritizing results based on a user’s network, while enabling the user to discover others in their extended network who share common interests.”
It’s very simple to sign up for Delver; registered users will (one assumes) get more out of it. TechCrunch indicated that users would be able to authenticate sources they wanted to be associated with by providing usernames and passwords – for example, for their Flickr account, their YouTube account, their LinkedIn account, and so forth. Once Delver knows who you are, it’s easy enough to find out who your friends are; for many social networks, this is effectively public information.
Next: Possible Issues >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
