U Rank: Microsoft Discovers Social Search - Searching With Friends
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Judging from U Rank's home page, its real power becomes apparent when you have a number of friends and you're all searching together or working on the same project. One example that U Rank gave was of a list of favorite restaurants, shared and maintained by a group of friends. Next to each entry, you could clearly see who had moved it up – and although only comments by the searcher were shown, one assumes that there's a way to set it up so you could see all of your friends' comments too.
It would work equally well with project-related material. If you're in a work group and you agree to share whatever resources you find under a particular search (say “Useful PHP tools”), then anyone in the group who does that search will find those links. Well, truthfully, anyone who is your friend will find those links if you've set them up to be shared, and they do that search. As ReadWriteWeb points out, “To be really useful, it would also be helpful if you could organize your friends into groups, so that you can share your searches on lists more selectively.”
If you're a blogger, and you're constantly scanning the web for ideas, this gives you another option for saving them. After searching with this service and finding something you want to read later (or even doing a quick skim of it in another window), you can put a comment under the result (such as “This guy doesn't know what he's talking about! Rant material”) and then save it under a search such as “My blog post ideas.” So rather than saving the link in a file on your computer, it's out in the “cloud.”
You might remember that one of the things on which you could click on U Rank's home page was a link to your friends. You can click on your friends individually and see what they're sharing. That's fun, but it's also worth remembering that U Rank is set up so that you're sharing searches by default. If you want to do searches that aren't shared, you must remember to click that feature off. This is worth keeping in mind if you have a tendency to conduct the kinds of searches you'd rather not share with your friends!
It's really nice to see Microsoft doing this, but we've seen a lot of these features before elsewhere. As Danny Sullivan correctly points out at Search Engine Land, U Rank provides functionality that is very similar to the Google Like/Don't Like experiment, the editing tools that Wikia Search recently began to provide users, and even by Hakia -- that latter has a way for you to check out “trusted results” from librarians and other informational professionals. Going beyond that, Searchles already has the group functionality that ReadWriteWeb wished for, and has had it since the beginning.
So the real question is, can Microsoft take something that so many others have already done and do it so much better that users prefer it? In some ways, that's a classic Google move; Microsoft's preferred approach is to come out with the “new” item and leverage its monopoly power to out compete those who are already in the space (“embrace and extend”). The software giant has no monopoly power in this space, however – and since this is a prototype, not an actual product, it's really premature to say what will happen with it.
On the other hand, it's an interesting start. And to some extent, it shows that Microsoft can think differently from the way it's used to thinking. Consider the examples I gave above; rather than having users store their links and information on a PC, and providing the software with which they do it, U Rank lets them organize their lives based on the searches they do, and keeps track of them so users can find the information again. Whether this will be taken up by web searchers and others trying to get things done remains to be seen, but it's good to see Microsoft trying to make itself useful in the ways people run their lives rather than attempting to force them into the software company's mold.
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