Searchles, We Hardly Knew You! - So What is Searchles Now?

Is Searchles a social bookmarking site, a social search engine, or a social networking site? As near as I can tell, it's a bit of all three, and each aspect feeds off the others. Shams explained in a presentation that his company's objective is "To be the glue between people and content on the Internet using social search to deliver better collaboration and more precise, relevant results."

In short, Searchles seems to be harnessing the kinds of networks that existed between people before the days of the Internet (and still exist today, of course), when you always knew who to ask if you didn't know how to do something or where to find something. You can join groups if you're interested in particular things, and if the group is public you can still search through the links posted there for information. You can find out a person's interests and go through their posts, tapping into their expertise without even having to contact them personally. If you do want to contact them personally, Searchles does have a message system.

You can interact with posts by sharing them with your friends, commenting on them, or rating them (which is one of the ways Searchles can spot spam and try to keep it under control). This is somewhat reminiscent of other sites such as Slashdot, but Searchles offers its users more features.

Searchles is particularly proud of its video search. Its users can post videos from a variety of sites, so it can index videos that you might not find on YouTube. That gives it a definite edge over sites that can only search their own videos, but it will be a while (if ever) before Searchles' index matches YouTube on sheer quantity. As to quality, well, it wouldn't be on Searchles if someone didn't see it, like it, and think it was worth sharing, though one can say the same thing about YouTube. It becomes a question of the taste of your users.

Searchles is a hybrid. It's been said of hybrids that they tend to not do any one thing well - but if you're a dog lover you also know that some of the hardiest dogs are mixed breeds. Searchles is not just a social bookmarking site, because people can comment on bookmarks and interact with other users; it's not just a social site like Slashdot or Digg because users are actually saving bookmarks and displaying their interests; it's not just a networking site because such sites (LinkedIn is one example; dating sites are another) don't typically have people posting and saving URLs, let alone having other people comment on them. About the only thing Searchles doesn't have that's Web 2.0 is separate blogs for its users.

You'd think all of this would be confusing, but Searchles has managed to pull it all together in a way that is easy to understand after you've played with the site for a while. And it can be rather addictive to play with. This lovable mutt is starting to look a little like a contender, and I'm looking forward to seeing what it comes up with next.