Delver, a search start-up that personalizes search results by paying attention to a person's social connections, has signed up for Yahoo's BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service). BOSS lets larger search sites use Yahoo's search results, tailored in any way desired but stripped of any Yahoo branding, in exchange for showing Yahoo ads or sharing revenue. Delver plans to mix those results in with its own technology, which shows results drawn from publicly visible parts of social sites such as profiles, blogs, bookmarks, and videos. Smaller sites and academic projects can use BOSS for free. "Leveraging Yahoo Search BOSS...
The Mechanical Zoo, a social search startup founded by a team of former Google employees, has raised $6 million in a first round of funding. Like many other companies, such as Delver and AskMeGo, The Mechanical Zoo says it’s trying to tailor web search results to personal tastes by tapping into a user’s “social graph”. What does that actually mean? As the company puts it, the service will allow users to “identify the right person, among the tens of thousands in your extended network, to answer a particular question.” So is there any reason to think The Mechanical Zoo will...
SecondBrain, the online content aggregator that launched a few weeks back, has added support for ten more services, including FriendFeed, Facebook, Diigo, Reddit, Mixx, Tumblr, Qik, Goodreads and Behance. While many consider SecondBrain a FriendFeed clone of sorts, there’s more to SecondBrain’s platform than lifestreaming. It takes your aggregated content and places it in an organized, searchable context. As you can see just by looking at the list of newly supported sites, SecondBrain supports a wide array of social bookmarking and media-sharing sites, most of which are good for individual marketing purposes once widespread redistribution gets going. A primary...
RentMineOnline is a recently launched search and recommendation tool that pairs landlords and lessees by leveraging online social media. One core component of this site is its referral system, which enables users to earn cash when someone moves into a property they recommended. This is one incentive that property managers have been using for decades, but when coupled with the existing networks one already has with their online social networks, the reach is much further and can be more powerful, especially if a given user happens to be somewhat of an influencer. While this online referral system within the...
Here at Profy, we keep a running tab of which authors are going to write about which topics so that we don't all end up writing the same article. Most of the topics clear out rather quickly, but sometimes we end up waiting for months for a beta invite to review a new application. I have several I've been waiting on since the beginning of the year, and like any early adopter magpie, when I see the shiny new invitation in my email account, I jump on it. Such was the case this morning with Delver, which debuted their private...
I first learned of Delver earlier this year at DEMO, and was impressed with the search engine that returned results based on your social graph on Facebook. It was a useful idea that could be applied to nearly every search query I could imagine, and a handy yet indirect way of receiving recommendations through such searches. Now, many months later, Delver is ready for its alpha launch, which I’ve been happily testing out for the past couple of days. One thing I noticed right off the bat was the large extension of Delver’s searchable network based on one’s social...
Information overload is a topic that keeps coming up, especially among users of social media services. As you add more friends and more services, the amount of content produced can become overwhelming to keep up with which leads to quality items being lost amongst the "noise." Noise-reducing apps like AideRSS or Moopz (both of which we love) highlight the best content, but their one drawback is that they determine relevance based on what the community thinks - and that may or may not be what you find interesting or important. With the new social search service from Delver, however, you...
Delver, which came out of stealth back in January is announcing today that its social graph search engine is open to the public. While the product certainly is intriguing, curb your expectations as Delver has slapped an “Alpha” status on it. The objective behind Delver is to uncover and make accessible knowledge and information that is hidden in users’ social graphs—an area that Google’s Marissa Mayer has indicated to be an essential part of Google’s future search offerings. Delver begins by mapping direct and implicit connections. For example, Delver would discover that Mark Hendrickson, Jason Kincaid and I are...
