The Jewish mind keeps coming up with new inventions and ideas, luring CEOs to the holy land, even in the July sun – no wonder Israel has some 3,500 start-up companies, 2nd only to the US.
My friend Lior Levin joined forces with ROR dude Elad Meidar to form StatusSearch.net, which brings you results from your friends’ updates in twitter and facebook. The idea is improving reliability of course – if I’m searching for Michael Jackson, my friends will provide better results than the general population, or I wouldn’t have followed/friended them to begin with. LinkedIn and MySpace integrations are on the way as well.
The idea is simple, and is a semi-semantic way to filter results. While twitter search crawls the entire user base, statussearch.net looks at your friends only, assuming they know what they talk about.. 😉
Couple of things I noticed from a brief use that are worth mentioning/conversing:
- True to the ‘real-time’ reality, the results are 1-paged, no option for ‘more’. You do get an icon to see the source of each result, but if your answer is 2-3 days old, you won’t see it. Also, it’s unclear to me how frequent the crawler works and if there’s any attempt to ‘even’ the results between twitter and facebook (think not). Does the engine displays ‘power users’ results first (because those users are more connected – thus what they say is more accurate/important/RTed/Liked)?
- Size matters? I’m following some 650 people and sport 950 friends in facebook, which makes my pool of knowledge average I guess, at 1,600 minds. There is wisdom in there, don’t get me wrong, but how will a 500-mind pool looks like? or 5,000?
- Memory loss. Sometimes I wish to see stuff I updated, and in that case I go to my own stream at twitter.com. Although I tried several times, no results from ‘me’ appeared in statussearch timeline, but that’s probably because I’m no longer friends with myself… 😉
- Integration points. There are 2, email alerts and a firefox search plugin, both highly welcome. You can create unlimited number (free, for now) of alerts and receive an email once something happen (daily or immediately). The FF plugin (accessible from every page, right-hand side) is most useful – I’m a huge search plugin fan that makes the solution serve you, where/when/how you want, and not vise-versa.
Overall, I think Lior and Elad are on to something. The web is filled with junk data, and everyone, big to small, are trying to come up with solutions that will filter the gold out. StatusSearch is not a semantic search engine, but by tapping your friends’ knowledge instead of the general population, we’re one step closer towards finding that ONE result we want.
