Others Online Blog

The Difference is Discovery

From SearchEngineLand this post on Beyond Google: Social Media Engines First, Other Search Engines Second points out the essential between social discovery and anti-social search (emphasis mine):

To me, search engines are places where people search, they express an active desire, usually through a keyword search. People don’t go to Digg because they’re looking for something. Instead, they want to discover things, to see what’s new, be entertained. That’s not search.

The unique aspect of OthersOnline as a service is that it truly is discovery, and this discovery happens without having to be on a particular Web site. Through a browser extension and through Web widgets, it is totally user-centric - no matter where you go, there you are.

Recent Improvements

The most visible aspect to the OthersOnline service is the display of people’s pictures and profiles in the browser - through either a toolbar or simple HTML widgets. We’ve been working on tuning the relevance of member profiles that are returned by our ‘profile matching’ Web service. There are a lot of factors that can be considered in the selection and sorting of member profiles and it isn’t always obvious how to put it all together to please the viewers the most. The area we have recently been experimenting with is “how much should recent keywords of others influence the results for the current user?” The more history that is used, the more keywords are available which results in finding more people that are relevant. But with too much history being used the results may be relevant to previous pages and less relevant to the current page, especially when browsing away from one concept and into another.

We’ve examined a few approaches and just yesterday afternoon deployed an update to the profile matching algorithm which seems to provide a noticable improvement to the relevance of the results - there should be a wider selection displayed and there should be more ‘connection words’ displayed that help explain why that particular result was chosen.

That’s the good news! Now for the embarassing news - during the deployment an error crept in which prevented members from logging in. Although it was quickly detected the resolution wasn’t as fast as it should have been and we apologize to everyone that may have encountered this outage.

If you have any questions or suggestions, post a comment or send an email to me (mike@).