SocialRank for Social Search

I just wanted to let you all know about what we’ve been working on in the ol’ R&D department (aka: the living room). The first version of SideStripe that you are using now has focused mostly on getting the basics of a social search engine built:

• creating personalized search indexes for all our users based on people in their social network
• delivering social search results in places where they can be useful in your day to day lives without asking you to change (the SideStripe Google widget)

Social search, even in it’s most basic form, is a very complex problem to solve mostly due to the fact that everyone who searches gets different, personalized results. No two searches are the same.

Now it’s time to take SideStripe to the next level by ensuring that the social results appear in the most relevant order for every individual user. This is particularly helpful for our widget since we only show three results when you do a search on Google using our Google Widget, but also makes a huge difference when looking at the remainder of your social results. So, without further delay, we would like to introduce you to SocialRank.

SocialRank is SideStripes's proprietary algorithm for sorting social search results. In addition to keyword relevancy (like a traditional search engine), SocialRank takes into account several factors related to your social network. Unfortunately I can’t say what those are at this point, but we will definitely share how it works in the very near future. Stay tuned…

 

Facebook Search vs SideStripe Search

We’ve had a few meetings where we are showing our technology to people and once in a while someone inevitably says, “What about Facebook’s search? Doesn’t it do this?” And since we all know that a picture says a thousand words, and a live real-time demo says 10,000 words (you’ve heard that before right?), we pull up Facebook and SideStripe and do side by side searches. This blog shows that comparison.

Here is a search for “wine” on Facebook using our CEO’s (Matt Bradley’s) Facebook account. He doesn’t mind… honestly!

 

So let’s examine these results:

1. Chris Wine is a connected friend on Facebook. All good.
2. Cult Vines Wine and Classic Wines….??  What are these? Wine companies I guess. Matt can add them as friends if he wants. Now you might ask, “Can a human and a company be friends?”  Yes. This is the Internet where anything can happen.
3. Another guy from Knoxville with “wine” found somewhere in his long last name (Winebrenner). Matt and this guy have a mutual friend, but Matt has never heard of this guy.
4. The next two results are wine related groups, “A Glass of Wine Solves Everything” and “I love wine!”. And although it may be true that a glass of wine does solve everything, it may not be what Matt is looking for.

So are any of these results useful? The first one would be useful if Matt were searching for Chris Wine specifically, maybe to send him a message or to see what’s going on in his life. Or if he were looking to join a wine group, then he could find them here.

Now lets look at the same search on SideStripe:

1. Friends review of a wine bar in San Francisco called District.
2. Another friend took pictures of his trip to Niagara wine country.
3. A couple of friends who have said they are interested in wine on their social network profile.

Conclusion

Facebook search helps you find people and groups to connect to whereas SideStripe search helps you find information about the people you know. This post is not intended to say our search is better than Facebook’s, it just shows that they are much different and have a different purpose.

What do you think? Which results would you rather see? Which do you think are more relevant if you were searching?

We’re Connected! Facebook Connected That Is…

We just pushed out Facebook Connect support which means you can login with one simple click on one of the Facebook Connect buttons. Or if you are a new SideStripe user, it’s just as easy. Look for the Facebook Connect button on the SideStripe home page or the button at the top of every page that looks like this:

Try it out and let us know what you think.

SideStripe on TechCrunch

I just opened TechCrunch and read an article by Erick Schonfeld called "The Future Of Social Search (Or Why Google Should Buy Facebook)" and was excited to see that SideStripe was the main attraction. The article had many comments that have topics including how social search might be important in the coming year.  I would have to agree on this point. The opportunity to enhance search is long overdue, and we are very ready to help people socialize their search and improve the quality of Google's search results. We are very excited with the response so far and looking forward to responding to all the user feedback. We are also currently in the process of getting ready for a new release with new features so stay tuned...

New Site Design

Very exciting news - we have updated our website with a new design. It has a cool new look and we think gets high marks for style points. It also gives some great examples that make it easy to understand how powerful SideStripe can be. We added some great content that describes about how to use SideStripe on Google and on Facebook. Check out the site here www.sidestripe.com 

2-Click Sign Up Process

We heard from many people that our sign-up process was long and confusing so I just wanted let everyone know about a much needed update  that we just pushed out . We’ve simplified it all down to a couple of clicks, you just need to add the application to your social network then one more click after that to complete the setup.

In addition, your friends that are not on SideStripe can now answer your questions directly on Facebook without having to sign up for SideStripe. This makes SideStripe a more useful tool for you because you can get more answers, and a much nicer experience for your friends as well.

Here is a screenshot of a couple of questions in my Facebook feed:

And here is the screen where your friends can answer questions:

Let us know what you think of the new updates and remember the old saying, “a question a day keeps the doctor away”…  errr, something like that anyways. So start asking questions and getting answers from the people you trust!

Social Networks and Search Engines

There are great social networks and there are great search engines. I’m going to provide a little background on these two great technologies/services and explain how SideStripe came to be.

Social networks are those places where we spend a bit of time to keep in touch with our friends and get back in touch with our long lost friends. There are a ton of them out there, but  Facebook and MySpace are the big players in the space with Facebook stealing the lead from MySpace this year. On social networks, we share things with our friends such as pictures we took on our last vacation and we what we are doing now. When you really dig into it, social networks are communication tools.

Search engines let us find information that is available on the Internet. Some do this better than others and usually “better” means that we find what we are looking for in the shortest amount of time (first page of results). Google became the dominant search engine because they figured out a “better” way to put the most relevant results at the top via their PageRank algorithm and until someone comes up with a “betterer” way than Google, they will remain the dominant search engine.

The idea for SideStripe came about from the following scenario that I’m sure you all can relate to: you search for something in your favorite search engine and after several searches, you just can’t find what you are looking for. So you call/text/IM/email a friend. For example, “general contractor san francisco”. You find some results, but you really don’t know who you can trust or anything about them, so the best thing to do is ask a friend who can recommend a contractor that they’ve had personal experience with. Or you search for “snowboarders” and you find the US Snowboarding Team, but what you really wanted to find is an activity partner and who better to be your activity partner than a friend.  It was this common scenario that provided us with the "Aha!” moment and thus we conceived of SideStripe to solve this very problem.