Decipho, the social search engine that I had written about couple of months back, has gone through another round of feature updates that adds some interesting dimensions to it. Searching by categories is out, instead you can refine your search with tags. These tags are user generated and you can signup for Decipho account and start tagging sites. Decipho has also added social networking component to the search engine.
The tagging and networking ends have nice functional roles to play at Decipho besides the obvious ones. Just like del.icio.us, for any of your friends you can see their tags and websites they have saved. Besides that, for each result set you get, Decipho brings up sites from the results that have been tagged by friends in your network. This makes your results that much more relevant since recommendations come from your peer group whom you really trust and also enables you to get to better sites faster instead of just depending on the search engine to deliver the best results. Decipho has also introduced “My Results” section, which is another way to find sites in your own bookmarks. With any keyword search Decipho brings up websites you have already ranked alongside your regular result set even if it is at listing number 50. You won’t realize the benefit of this feature if you have tagged just 50-100 sites. But lets consider that number is 10000. Its better to use Decipho to let you connect to your past effort instead of going through the same drill again.
On the whole ideas are good, but Decipho needs to put in lot of work on the UI side of things. Most of the features are not obvious to a new user who might leave without getting to know the functionality build into the system. Things like enabling inline tagging in the search results, inline bookmarking, easier reach to user network are just of my recommendations.
Links:
Decipho
March 16, 2007 at 9:11 pm |
[...] Decipho mixes search, tags, social networking By Vivek These tags are user generated and you can signup for Decipho account and start tagging sites. Decipho has also added social networking component to the search engine. The tagging and networking ends have nice functional roles to play at … http://startupsquad.com/2007/03/16/decipho-mixes-search-tags-social-networking/ StartupSquad http://startupsquad.com [...]
March 19, 2007 at 7:44 pm |
[...] Why don’t del.icio.us do this via Yahoo! search, what would happen is at del.icio.us you could search the web (Yahoo!), each hit in the results will list tags if they have already been tagged in del.icio.us, if a hit doesn’t have any tags, then you can tag it if you like (this will add it to del.icio.us). Anyway if you click on a tag listed underneath a hit in your search results, it will go to that tag page in del.icio.us, so what has happenend is you are searching the web, and when you find a hit you like, you have a chance of finding related/similar stuff according to users. Another option woudl be to just search the human indexed web according to del.icio.us, ie. full-text search of all bookmarks in del.icio.us. What I’m hoping for one day is the meta-human indexed web search engine, what Zniff does for Spurl, Wink also search full-text across different bookmark services as well as its own, and the unforgotten Gataga. Ideally this would be searching the tagosphere, which was my prediction for 2006…got that one wrong. [via StartUpSquad] [...]