I just finished reading an interesting press release that entitled, “Social Search Engine Sproose.com Surpasses 250K Unique Users Thirty Days Out Of Beta.” This press release starts off by talking about the recent achievements of this social search engine. Furthermore, it also mentioned Sproose has added 30,000 new sources to its database recently. According to the press release, Sproose CEO, Bob Pack says, “It has far exceeded our expectations and is a testament that people like the idea of a user moderated search engine. Our technology is working well and now it is time for us to add more features and market the company.”

In matter of fact, Sproose allows its users to vote for their favorite Web sites and rank the index according to the score given. It also used its own “Knowledge Rank”, a terminology sounds familiar to Google’s Page Rank or Ask.com’s ExpertRank, the search technologies to determine the rankings of the sites that it search on the Web. As I using it to search some of the Web sites, Sproose did returned some reasonable search results. However, I quite disappointed that when I typed “TagEdge”, it did not return any page of my blog. Though Sproose is a social search engine, it does not restricted itself only to Web page, it also provides search on news, videos, and searching through the tag cloud. In order to encourage the users in participate the social search, Sproose also give-away a free iPod 2G Nano to the user who votes the most Web sites each month.

There are anticipations on the Web that the future is belongs to the social search engines that embedded the beauty of user-generated content. I’m not surprise of the vision of Sproose’s management in developing the social search engine. From the background they have had in the areas of search technologies, developing a social search engine is their expertise. In prior to this, they have self-funded over the past year and a half. However, like other successful startups, they need funds from the venture capitalists to further expand the company. In my observations, this company has a bright future if they have enough funds to rapidly visualize their product ideas and services.