Me.dium Social Search - Search With Crowd Power!
Me.dium.com/search is a new project by the social browsing application Me.dium.com and filters content based on what other people are currently browsing.
Before I can talk about the actual search application itself, it’s important to understand where the data supplying the search is coming from. Me.dium’s first wave in the 2.0 pond came from their social browsing toolbar. This is an application you can install into your browser that allows you to browse with your friends online; They can see what you are viewing, you can see what they are viewing, and you can chat between each other across web pages. Me.dium then collects the data from your browsing usage (with the appropriate amount of anonymity) to determine what are the most popular pages.
So, now we get into the search itself. Me.dium provides two options: 1) Crowd-Search and Standard web search combined 2) Only searching within the social results. By default, Me.dium provides the combo search simply by pressing enter. This gives you the type of search results you would normally find in a standard search engine, with an influence of the user community. In addition, they provide a button labeled “I feel Social” that will focus the search soley on the crowd provided data. These two options make this a rather powerful search provider for finding information on the web.
What’s interesting is that this concept hasn’t been tried before. I’m surprised that Yahoo! didn’t pick up on this approach and incorporate it into their standard search results, populating the crowd data with results from del.icio.us. Yeah, del.icio.us does have a search capability, but it’s relatively useless since it’s search capabilities are limited to a simple tag search.
I highly recommend this site and installing this plugin. This is one I will definately use in my own daily browsing.
Via: Altsearchengines.com
July 20th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
[...] For example, Mahalo focuses on user contributed entries, Powerset relies on a semantic engine, and Me.dium relies on the community. Loud3r takes this one step further and combines all three. [...]
July 21st, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Thanks for mentioning us on your site and doing such a thorough job of describing how our search engine works. I am part of the community team at Me.dium and if you have any questions, feedback, or further comments on our search engine, toolbars, or social sidebar please send me an email at cmaller@me.dium.com Also, if you would like any more info on what we are doing here at Me.dium please contact me. Thanks again and great post.