The Web in your neighbourhood
| Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 | --sundar |
Most people would've got frustrated at some point or the other with regular web search, because it doesn't always give what you want. One good way to find what you'd want is to look in your neighbourhood. I've felt this when I wanted to learn German and searched MyWeb 2.0. Below is what I got:
Since I live in Bangalore, the first result (saved by my buddy) shown is the most relevant one for me! I wouldn't have got it with the usual web search. Well, as the results for "learning French" show, it's not as good with every query. For better results, one should invite all their trusted sources to MyWeb 2.0.
The utility of social search is not limited to locality-sensitive queries. It could be useful in case of queries like "chop", which could mean different things for different communities. Sometimes, one might just stumble upon something interesting like how I came across Tamil internet radio from a friend's web. I'd like to call this technology-mediated serendipity!
Update: Nate has a very well illustrated post about Myweb2. Don't miss the annotated screenshots at flickR.