If you could search your friends’ thoughts, interests, and activities, would that be a better search experience? In many cases, it would be. Searching for restaurants, books, or movies, would turn up recommendations from people you actually know. If you are researching a trip to Florence, Italy, you might discover ten friends who have been there already, and could ask for advice on what to do.

What a great way to tell the story of socially-connected search, and of Delver!

However, Eric then goes on to predict that this will only succeed when Google buys Facebook, finds a great way to solve social ranking, and adds Facebook Connect to Google Search. Well, that already makes the story far from simple. If Google has to solve social ranking by itself, that leaves Facebook’s value to be the graph only. But Google knows very well that the graph data will eventually be public, that’s why it embraced Brad Fitzpatrick’s early ideas and hired him to produce the Social Graph API from the public data that’s already available.

But the issue runs deeper. Google has made some steps in the social path, with Social Graph API, Friend Connect, the recent profiles push and even SearchWiki. However, Google’s inherent approach to search is one of aggregated ranking algorithms (as much as they may use social inputs), and such a major step into personalized social ranking is still too much of a revolution to happen anytime soon. Personalizing ranking functions presents major technological challenges, and personalizing them based on network data - even more. Google would need to change across many other levels to achieve that, take for example assessing relevance changes - A/B testing on masses of users will be a lot more difficult, with each user being served from a different ranking function…

So yes, social ranking is difficult. But don’t talk about it in future terms - it is already present, in Delver!

I’m part of the Diggers team - we write the crawlers that build our growing index of profile, contents, and relations. This is one major difference between crawling the web for some other search engine and crawling it for Delver - other search engines only care about documents or web pages, and their interconnecting links.

We, as a socially oriented search engine, are on a mission to map out the global social network, composed of the separate islands you know as LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. In addition, we still need to find and index content from websites like Flickr and Delicious and also from “generic” web pages and blogs that are not included in our known list of sources.

The real value in our offering is the powerful combination of your social network with the relations of people to content. It’s not enough to know that I know someone who went to school with someone, we also need to understand that this someone bookmarked (or authored) this page. All of this is reflected in the design of our parsers, that can extract more specialized information from a page than a standard uniform crawler will ever be able to.

We have just now finished development of a generic blog parser, in a social context of course. The immediate benefits to bloggers are:

• Delver now supports most major blog platforms - as a blogger, or a friend of one, you and your social network can now search more opinions and blog posts that matter to you. Just make sure you let us know which blogs you like, by bookmarking them through a service like Delicious, entering them in your LinkedIn profile, or putting your own blog in your “Network” page.
• We treat blogs as another social network - while less explicit than other social networks, the blogosphere is very social indeed (pdf). Lots of blogs have blogrolls with websites that matter to them, and we will use this information to connect you to your blogging friends and recommended blogs.

Stay tuned for more from the Diggers and the rest of Delver, and don’t forget to let us know if you have interesting ideas on blogging and in general.

The sign for a successful talk is getting good questions from the audience, and indeed we got some excellent ones. I’ll elaborate on one here, as it illustrates a basic constraint that is deeply rooted in socially-connected search design, so much that we forgot to mention it in the talk

The asker wondered why it was so important for us to align users’ separate identities in the graph (slide 12). So let’s look at an example: I have a flickr account and a blog, but the friends I have on flickr are not necessarily bloggers. Now, it could be very useful for a flickr friend of mine to see search result from a person on my blogroll, as that’s a clear indication of my trust in that person’s opinions. However, if the social graph nodes of my flickr identity and of my blog identity are not aligned, that relation will not be inferred, missing out on a great deal of excellent socially-connected results.

The goal was to make this image appeal to a crowd of users that was as wide and as diverse as possible, catering for both genders, for all ages and as many cultures and nationalities as possible. This had to be accomplished without being offensive towards anyone, however keeping a strong emphasis on making it likable, catchy, noticeable and memorable on the cyber world.

I decided that I would use a pencil instead of the more obvious and immediate options available with graphic software. Being a manual technique, the pencil generates a kind of warmth which allows one to feel and see the person behind the work thereby making it more approachable and unique.

The first thing I did was look up the word Delve (one who is engaged in delving) in the dictionary and found the following:

delve (delv)
intransitive verb delved, delving delv’-ing
1. To dig with a spade
2. To investigate for information; search (into books, the past, etc.)

With this in mind, I started drawing up drafts of animal figures that could be associated with the word Delver and based on the above definition, I came up with drafts of many kinds of rodents like:

Check out Tamar’s profile in Delver here.

We’ve just announced our partnership with Yahoo! to augment Delver Social Search with results from Yahoo! Search BOSS. The new service is now live on http://www.delver.com/ so go ahead and experience it, and let us know what you think.

Unlike some other products where BOSS serves as the product’s entire search backbone, Delver uses BOSS to complement our core search service, and we’d like to share some of our experience and insights in this post.

1. The concept

Delver is a Social Search engine, and more specifically a socially-connected type of Social Search, with each user seeing results prioritized by that specific user’s social networks and graph. This subjective type of ranking is quite different from the authoritative approach that characterizes all major search engines, including Yahoo!. We see our approach as one that is complemented by authoritative ranking, depending on the query - if our user is searching for advice from friends on how to best spend the time in an upcoming vacation, Delver will have the best answers. But when the user needs information on Napoleon’s battles for a history homework, authoritative ranking may become more useful.

Yahoo! BOSS allowed us to answer all of our users’ needs without developing a traditional search engine from scratch, on top of our core agenda. When we serve a query with results, we retrieve BOSS results and embed them complementary results, positioned according to its relevance to the query.

2. Seamless experience

In any major search engine, a user seeking authoritative results will usually be satisfied with the first 1-2 results. Rather than merging a large portion of results and confusing the user with which result is from where (a-la meta-search), we chose to display 1-2 BOSS results in the standard Delver metaphor, with our “General Web” as the source. If the user would like to see more, the “More results” link leads to a full results page, again in the standard Delver metaphor that groups search results by user (rather than domain). All these customizations, plus keeping in line with the exact Delver look and feel, could only be supported by a flexible search partnership and TOS, such as BOSS.

3. Merging result sets

Even when not operating as a full meta-search, some merge questions arise. Questions such as how to produce a combined ranking formula, or how to filter out duplicate results. With disparate search indices, such questions can become a major performance issue, so consider them carefully.

4. Search services

BOSS offers a lot more than just search results. In particular, some search services can be very difficult for a young search company to create without access to search essentials, such as massive query logs. One example where BOSS comes in handy is the Spelling Suggestion API, which is offered also by other providers, but the BOSS TOS truly allow us to put this concern aside and use the Yahoo! infrastructure. We have implemented spell suggestions into Delver and are looking into other similar services which Yahoo! exposed, or will expose soon.

5. Search infrastructure community

Yahoo’s BOSS Developers Community is growing rapidly, and a lot of it is thanks to the excellent responsiveness and cooperation of Yahoo! BOSS staff. When we encountered some issues with results parsing, the BOSS team responded within a very short time with a fix. Thanks guys!

The dilemma between search and browse paradigms runs through many software user interfaces, and was especially emphasized with Google’s focus on search in their products. In some areas, such as finding web sites, the search paradigm has undisputably won and the once-king Yahoo! Directory barely has a stub article in Wikipedia. In others, such as news, search is a rarely used service, and a portal-like browse interface rules.

But in reality these are complementary paradigms, rather than competing. Browsing is excellent when the data fits a clear and sufficiently granular taxonomy, shared by the author and reader, and unstructured searching fits into all the other cases (and in some cases, like web search, that’s all there is). Oh, and one more difference: search is A LOT easier. Just stuff all the text into strong index machines, and give the user the ubiquitous search box.

With gmail I wouldn’t think twice before moving an email to the archive, I have no doubt I’ll find it when needed, and all the hassle of managing folders is gone. Blogs should be no different. You have an author communicating a heap of knowledge to readers, and instead of sorting it for future reference in tags and categories (the complete opposite of “…a clear and sufficiently granular taxonomy…“) they should be gmailized - stuff them in an index and search.

Ah, you say, just embed a blog search box. Sure, but I have dozens of blogs I want to search in. So use some blogs search aggregator, you suggest. But I don’t want to get results from all the blogs out there, just from those I care about. Well, then, guess you’ll need to build yourself a custom search… or just use Delver. Knowing that in a few years every major search engine will integrate social features, I can carelessly blog about anything my social circle could find useful, without bothering about categorizing with the perfect keywords (hint: there aren’t any) - social search will find them!

Cool News: We have been invited by Dow Jones VentureWire to present at their upcoming Technology Showcase Conference scheduled for Nov. 18-19, 2008.

Liad Agmon, our CEO, will be there presenting Delver. He’ll be talking about social search and new search paradigms that leverage users’ social graph for a more personal and relevant search experience.

You have a choice of adding:

• Your Facebook contacts ( they will be added to your network in delver)
• Your Facebook profile data (basic data or extended – such as work, education and hobbies etc) –it will show up on your profile page and so that people can find you more easily
• Your Facebook media (pictures and tags) – so that your friends can easily find them.

You don’t have to be registered to try this feature. You can use it by selecting your Facebook profile like so:

… or you can go to the “my network” page and click on “import” next to the Facebook box.

After adding your Facebook connections, you will immediately be able to see your connections on your Delver profile page. In the meantime, we’ll index the data so within up to a few hours fresh new data will show up in your search results.

Facebook is a very popular social network, and we’re proud to allow you to use it with Delver. We would love to get your feedback on this feature – try it out and let us know what’s on your mind.

We will be introducing our partner program and demonstrating how Delver partners get more page views. Delver has a unique search solution for your social networks, widgets and social applications, one that will make your users have a great search experience and come back for more!

Also, don’t forget to ask for our T-shirt! (Delver is not only changing Search, we also do it in style)