Dumbfind.com founder Chris Seline isn’t above making up silly words to promote his new products. Seline dumbfound that “searchiness” was appropriate for his “searchiest search engine,” and recently launched a search/social bookmarking hybrid he calls “Searchles.”
“It’s pronounced circles” is the wry slogan at Searchles.com. The explanation: search plus circles, obviously, equals “searchles,” pronounced “circles.”
“You can think of it as a cross between MySpace and a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us or Furl,” said spokesman Eric Young of Dumbfind Communications. “It’s all about connecting to your friends and sharing information and making everything easily searchable.”
Searchles uses a social search platform centered on groups rather than individuals, and will soon be integrated with the Dumbfind search engine. This means that the social networking on the site will influence search results.
“Words and tags have no credibility unless they are backed up by someone you know. We created Searchles to put users in control of their search experience and to let them harness the collective brainpower of their peers,” said Seline.
“I was also tired of getting swamped with emails from friends on every subject that interested them. Now, I will just go to their profile and check out what they are doing.”
Fans of viral internet video sites YouTube and Google Video can tag videos for automatic integration with Searchles, viewable without leaving the page. MySpacers can install Personal Flash tag clouds to run on their profile pages.
“I wanted to apply the same values I embraced when creating the search engine Dumbfind.com – efficiency and respect for the user’s intuition – to a social search platform ,” said Seline.
“We designed Searchles to provide users with a better experience for finding information on the web. You won’t find this on Google, Yahoo, del.icio.us, Furl, or Microsoft’s MSN.”
