Delver’s social media search

Bigmouthmedia yesterday reported the launch of new social search engine, Scour, which allows users to vote and comment on search results from major search engines. Today we bring you another service, Delver, which has been described as a “social search engine”. Delver is now in alpha testing and could more accurately be described as a social media search engine.

Sign up to Delver and it correlates your various identities across social media sites such as Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Linkedin and MySpace, making one list of your friends and your friends of friends. That’s pretty cool to start with but what it does next is even better.

When you search for something using Delver, it gives precedence to links and content from your friends and their friends. For example, if you searched for a record shop in London, the results would include shops that your friends vouch for or at least ones that their friends like.

This sort of online collaboration and customisation of results is getting bigger all the time on the web and is a taxctic that both Scour and Delver have decided to persue. The advantage that Delver has over Scour is that by scraping information from other social media sites, it has a huge database of information ready to go. Provided you have social media friends already, you’ll get personalised results straight away.

Delver doesn’t stop there though; it has numerous other interesting features. If you don’t have a large circle of social media friends then you can choose someone on Delver to be your “search buddy”. Doing this will provide you with the search results that they would normally receive, so it’s best to make your buddy someone you have a few things in common with.

On the downside, the site doesn’t yet index Twitter or Bebo although there are plans to group Twitter posts together in future and add them to the index. The results are not perfect yet either but are likely to improve during alpha testing and as more people use the service.

The social search market is starting to warm up and there are now a few sites doing similar things. To become dominant, one will have to do something different. Something better. Delver is not only providing personalised search results but is bringing together user profiles from different social media sites. For now it uses the information in these sites to power its search results but the internet has been crying out for a site where all your social media profiles can be controlled from a single place. With a bit of foresight and ambition, Delver could eventually become that place.


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