I've played with Delver today, which has a slightly different concept of search. It's based around social search, and it's really quite impressive. The idea is obvious - you'll like what your friends like (which may or may not be true) and so you will get more from searching if you can see what they're talking about - which of course only works if they are talking about stuff.
Before you can run a search Delver wants to know all about you - but it doesn't require password access or anything like that - it simply wants to identify you. So you can give it your name (great as long as you're not John Smith, but even with my name I was taken aback as to how many Phil Bradleys there are!) and other details, like email addresses, or you can go further and provide it with profiles at places like delicious, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on. When it's done that, it creates your community for you, which looks rather like this:
If you're sharp eyed you may see one or two people that you know, or they might even *be* you. Once this community generation has taken place you're ready to search. Stuff that is found will not be what you expect, if you run the same search on a regular basis, because Delver takes more account of your community, and also how you describe yourself. It's easy to change the results that you get by changing your own description - if I call myself an 'Internet Consultant' then I get a bunch of results from people who also call themselves that, while if I call myself a librarian, the results differ again.
In order to get the most out of this search engine it's really going to be necessary to fine tune your profile and community. I added in details on my Flickr account for example, which is going to skew results in a personal, rather than professional capacity. Delver is also going to work or fail individually based on how active your friends are in their own communities. However, it was fairly easy to tweak, but I have to wonder how many people are going to want to do that.
Is Delver going to make a success of this? My guess is not, and it's down to the registering and tweaking. Most people are simply not going to bother. However, the concept is good, and all it needs is for a search engine to take up the concept - a search engine that already logs you in, that has a note of what you search for, which blogs you write or comment in and so on. If Delver doesn't get bought up shortly, or one of the big engines doesn't embrace the concept I'll be quite surprised.
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