When I reviewed social bookmarking site Searchles about eight months ago, it looked so promising and the people in charge had so many great new ideas that I figured I’d want to check back in a year to see how they were doing. I’m four months early, but the site has already changed so much that it warrants a second review.
I skimmed my previous review before starting the research for this one; for those of you who want to get up to speed, you can read it here. At the end I noted that the search engine bears watching, and it's nice to see that I was proven right. But before I dive into the larger changes, let me talk about some of the changes they've made that I think of as incremental.
As part of my previous review, I became a member of Searchles, and I've found it helpful in my line of work. I belong to several groups, and I would receive an email every time a link was posted to one of those groups, as well as every time someone commented on one of my links...or even one of my comments. That got me a lot of article ideas, but also far too much email. So I was very happy when Searchles put a little more control in the hands of its users; to wit, take a look at this preference panel (cropped and shrunk to fit):
Instead of getting an email every time something happens, you have fine grained control for all of your groups and all of your notification types - so you can get a notice immediately, when you receive a summary, or never. This has massively reduced interruptions for me while still giving me the helpful information I need. Incidentally, the drop-down for how frequently you receive a summary email offers lots of different options, from every hour to every three days.
Another change I think of as incremental is how much Searchles uses AJAX on its site now. Whenever you make a comment or save certain changes, the site carries out the operation without having to reload the page. I never thought of how much of a difference that could make in the user experience until I started running into it more; now visiting a site where the pages reload for these simple things feels almost primitive. Kudos for the change!
Searchles has made a lot of other changes to its look and capabilities which, to be honest, I haven't had the time to check out until now. But when Elias Shams, CEO of Searchles, sent me a press release with the latest list of changes to the site, well, with a looming deadline I couldn't resist.
Search Engine News 
