Searchles: The Next Generation of Search? - Good So Far, But Room for Improvement
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I shouldn’t put down Searchles for my own uncertainties with new technologies. And to be honest, it’s a very promising social search engine, especially for being in existence only three months. But there were some things I really would have liked to have seen that it either doesn’t have or weren’t obvious.
For openers, an on-site tutorial that takes you through everything you can do would have been nice. I know the company posted a tutorial on YouTube, but when I checked that out, there didn’t seem to be an audio track; just showing you with the visuals isn’t enough (and I did check my equipment to make sure it wasn’t just me). I was able to figure out how to add friends and several other things, thanks to links in the appropriate places, but I’m the sort of person that likes to RTFM. Fortunately, when you click help, the site takes you to a page that includes links to several categories, such as FAQ, bookmarklet, user questions, groups, and tags, and that really is helpful.
I didn’t see any way that you could designate certain links as private (not shared by the community). You could choose whether or not to share them with any groups you happened to join. I can understand the reasoning behind that, but I could certainly see people wanting to keep certain links private or share them with only a few people.
This point leads to another question about information. There also doesn’t seem to be any way for you to keep any part of your profile private. People can search for you, find out who your friends and groups are, all of the links you have added, and so on. This isn’t a bad thing, as long as users don’t mind (and it probably explains why Searchles asks for so little information in the profile).
By the way, when it comes to making friends or joining groups, people can do that completely without your knowledge -- though you do receive an email letting you know that someone has added you as a friend. I told our CTO Rich Smith about Searchles, and he tried it out. I was able to make him one of my friends easily once I saw his handle; I don't know if he received an email when I added him, but I received one when he added me. (I didn't know about it right away because the email I used is heavily spam-protected). You can send people messages through the site itself pretty easily, which is a nice touch. Joining a group is just as easy as making friends; just find the group you want to join, and there’s a link at the top labeled “join this group.” Click it, and you’re a member.
Groups have owners (the person who created the group in the first place). I don’t know if the owner gets a message when someone joins the group, but it seems to me that this would be common courtesy – or maybe I’m just old-fashioned. Truthfully, most of the items I’m pointing out could be seen as positives just as easily as negatives; I freely admit I’m hypersensitive when it comes to issues of online privacy.
On the other hand, I think it would be kind of neat if Searchles had an actual forum. Groups form communities of sorts; there are home pages for groups just as there are for individuals. And of course you can send people messages. But forums allow for more interaction, and, I think, more of a feeling of community.
Having said all of that, I’d like to add one more thing. With Google’s recent purchase of YouTube, I think that, if the search leader is smart, its next major purchase will be a social search engine like del.icio.us. And Searchles bears watching. With its fine-grained user control, relatively easy-to-use interface, and double search box approach, it offers some unique features. Give it another six months to a year, and I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more about it.
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