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…
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