Social Searching and Collaborative Filtering

In the early years of this century, my friends and I finally got what we were half-expecting. We figured that as soon as enough of our friends joined the internet, we would have enough interaction data to begin to realize a true benefit of online communities: filtering on the likes and dislikes of our social circle. We were finally able to discover stuff instantly based on what our friends and family were discovering.

With sites like StumbleUpon and Last.fm stealing the social media headlines, I took some time to explore "social searching". I present this list of search engines that filter results based on things other than keywords; like collaboration and input from social circles or like-minded community behaviors or implied meanings.

hakia
A semantic search engine that brings relevant results based on concept match rather than keyword match or popularity ranking.

Acoona
Accoona's proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms deliver relevant results by merging online and offline information and by analyzing search terms rather than just matching keywords.

bessed
Find websites that are ranked well by your peers. Leave comments about sites or recommend information.

Powerset
Employing technologies that take advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language.

ChaCha
Mobile search solutions plus live human guides to help you find what you are looking for.

Squidoo
Squidoo's goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search.

sproose
Sproose is a user powered search engine that allows users to contribute to the ranking of web pages by voting for pages they find useful. Sproose also enables users to browse pages that have been voted and/or tagged by other users making it easy to discover new and interesting pages in a social network environment.

Eurekster
A custom search portal around the topic of your choice powered by your community.