The most impressive thing about the new search engine
is that it knows who you are and who
your friends are even if you don’t import your address book or add your social
networking profiles. Instead, Delver leverages the social graph to map out a
user’s social connections. Since everyone’s social graph is unique, like a
fingerprint, the same query will yield vastly different results for each user.
The results are more personal and meaningful to users than a generic search
using “normal” search engine.
But don’t call Delver a “social search engine.”
“That name belongs to services like Mahalo,” says Liad Agmon, Delver
CEO. “We prefer the term ‘socially connected search engine’.” That term makes sense because Delver is not a social network built around a search engine,
but a search engine who indexes and queries your social network to deliver its
results. Instead of just looking at a web site’s popularity, Delver looks at
information like whether your friends have tagged the site or if it’s found on
their social network profiles, bookmarking sites, photos and video sharing
sites, or on their blogs. The results are more relevant because they account for
who a person is and what they find valuable.
Agmon adds, “People want trusted information from their friends, but may
not know who in their network is knowledgeable about a given topic. We make Web
search more fun and meaningful by prioritizing results based on a user’s
network, while enabling the user to discover others in their extended network
who share common interests.”
Even without registering for an account, Delver will try to determine who you
are by searching any public social network profiles you may have on sites like
Flickr, Facebook, and YouTube. If you do decide to register on the site, though,
you can then choose to associate your accounts with Delver in order to obtain
even more accurate results. Delver currently indexes the entire web, and
specifically indexes people’s social connections on flickr, MySpace, LinkedIn,
YouTube, hi5, facebook, Blogger, and, they are adding more all the time. When
they go into public beta (circa May, 2008), an optional email import process
will be provided as well.
Maximizing Your “Whole” Social Network
Many of us have friends, family members, or colleagues on sites like MySpace
and facebook who aren’t into using all the latest and greatest web apps and
technologies. These friends may have a MySpace profile or a blog, but without
visiting these sites directly, there was no way to gather information from these
people before. Now with Delver, their profiles and contributions to your social
graph are indexed.
No one has to sign up for Delver for you to have them included in your search
results.
This is a real breakthrough since prior to Delver, the maximum value you
would get out of social networks was directly related to how many of your
friends would join. I don’t know about you, but I still have plenty of friends
who are on MySpace and nothing else, and are quite content with that. With each
new social network I joined, the number of my non-tech friends that would follow
me dwindled down to nearly nothing. Now it doesn’t matter. They can stay on
MySpace forever and yet the content they create there will be valuable to me.
Privacy Concerns?
It’s important to understand that Delver doesn’t display anything that isn’t
already publicly available. “If Google can get to it, so can Delver,”
says Agmon. But Delver just makes it so much easier to do so. You can access
people’s social information with such ease that anyone who hasn’t been good
about setting their profiles to “private” (or who doesn’t know to do so), may be
surprised to find themselves searchable on Delver.
Using Delver
After claiming your identity in Delver, your social graph is mapped and
displayed for you beneath the Delver search box. Dotted lines connect you to
your friends and your “friends of friends.”
When you perform a query, results from all over your social web display.
You can narrow down your search to just display the people related to your
search term or just media results by clicking the links at the top.
Each search result displays, via a breadcrumb trail, your relationship to
the person associated with that result. You can hover your mouse over their name
to see their photo and their relationship to you. Even if you and them are not
directly related as “friends” on a social network, you can still click the plus
sign beneath their picture to add them as a connection. This will then add them
into the mix of your search results in the future. This way, you can view the
relevant bookmarks, links, blog posts, photos, and videos of people like you
even if you don’t know them personally…and they don’t have to confirm the
connection on their end.
Alternately, you can choose to exclude certain connections from your search
results as well, which is perfect for eliminating those “who-is-that-guy?”
friendships left over from your days of MySpace friend accumulation contests.
When Will It Arrive?
Delver is headquartered in Herzliya, Israel and will
officially open U.S. offices in Silicon Valley in spring of 2008. Having just
premiered at DEMO, Delver won’t be in beta until March. Those interested in
being included in the private beta can sign up for an invite on the
home page.
