For the readers that followed closely on TagEdge, you all know that I often profile on Israeli startups, and used to think that Israeli startups as not merely the creative technology firms, but also firms that will change the world eventually. A new social search engine called Delver is the one that I like indeed, my first impression was…eh, which was a too cold cool social search engine that not to sign-up and try.

Delver is currently in Alpha phase. If it is barely a search engine, or meta search, that’s not much I can talk about. However, it applied a new technology called social search which offer a way for users to bookmark, or Web, people, media search based on their social graph. If you don’t have any profiles in any social network, you won’t notice this wonderful feature. But if you register and link all your profiles, range from MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, to Facebook, you’ll realize the powerful search engine rendered by Delver.

From the profile linking, you can add your own search buddies, that enables you to give priority to results created or referenced by these people. Furthermore, you also can add social circles, which offer a way connect you with people that have something in common with you. Delver will take into consideration on who your friends are and it will return your search queries based the contents that your friends made on Delver as well as what bookmarks they’ve done in the past on Delver. Put simply, Delver can deliver a totally different search results based on your trusted friends you followed on Delver and indexed what they’ve done and their ultimate goal is to recommend your friends’ search results to you completely.

I’d like to share what I thought Delver is good in the practice that it allowed one to easily bookmark certain results with a single click namely “keep it,” the search result you like will instantly save to the right-hand sidebar for your future references. Also, I want to note here after played around it for a while, I knew that its ranking methodology is based on your own social connections, your friends’ quality contents will always be ranked higher than the other search results that based on the keywords you input into the Delver search bar.

In overall, I still feel Delver is very cool, but I’ll give it a second look, when it ready for the beta launch in the near future.

A new social search engine that called What’s Open is launching its public beta version today. However, for those who want to access this social search engine through iPhone or Google Android application, other than Web, they can sign-up and use this platform only if they’re reside in the U.S., Europe or China based on the first-come first-serve basis. From my observation on the design and features of this What’s Open, it seemed that they’ve put in several months of effort before rolling out this public version. Apparently, What’s Open is a good alternative to Google, or Yahoo! or even Baidu (in China) when come to directory search on the Web. They’ve a whopping database index of global listings that amounted to 50 million, of which 1 million can be found live on the California What’s Open’s Google Maps now.

I consider this platform as a successful mashup of Google Maps and social search. Nevertheless, I feel it works best when they’ve successfully found a niche area to target in their social search strategies, and committed to compatible iPhone, Google Android applications and social networking platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and many more.

Currently, What’s Open has presence in the U.S., China and Hong Kong. Their key offices are located in Newport Beach and Mountain View of California, New York, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

The other day I came across a new startup that launched about two weeks ago. It was called BAAGZ that founded by a French search engine Exalead and the site is built on Ajax, feeds, with some mature social search and semantic technologies which include search and information access, content tagging and evaluation.

BAAGZ is a new form of social network that allowed its users, they preferred the name “Baagerz”, to easily store their favorite things online in a file format, or a folder called “baagz.” Since it was powered by the social search technology, it’s not surprise that the semantic search will suggest their users on the things they like, and eventually connect the users with a common interest in an interest-oriented groups. With the shared folder, i.e. baagz, users can share with their group members their favorite Web pages, articles, links, blog entries, pictures, videos, etc. Perhaps the most important BAAGZ’s approach is the capability of indexing the baagz for social search and the ability to notify its users when something new appear on the network. In other word, users can find social recommendations they want through the tagged content stored in a baagz created by other users, or simply waiting for the notifications. A bit acted like the social bookmarking approach. Moreover, Baagz can be publicly viewed, shared only with an user’s friends, or in private.

Currently, BAAGZ is still in private beta and only supports Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7. I will report back on this BAAGZ when it officially available to the public. Stay tuned.

CoReap is hot in the Blogosphere, most of the well-known technology blogs are profiling on this startup recently. As stated in its landing page, CoReap: A social search and bookmarking add-on for the Web browsers. To better understand this, it was a tool that helps user to find and bookmark the Website of interest. In a form like a sidebar application, it offered several features, such as sharing your bookmarks with your friends, publish and share a RSS feed of your recent public bookmarks in a widget on your blog or Website. As a consequence, there will be a RSS feed button to be showed on your CoReap widget.

At this point, it provide a an extension for the Firefox and IE browser. However, the most powerful social search integration was not fully supported on IE yet. By any measure, it done a job with the search engine integration functionality with Google and Yahoo!

CoReap is based in Melbourne, Australia.

Update: CoReap was selected as one of the 25 start-ups on spigit, for their social networking and market simulation platform.

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 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 websites 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 websites, Sproose did returned some reasonable search results. However, I quite disappointed that when I typed “TagEdge”, it did not return any pages of my blog. Though Sproose is a social search engine, it does not restricted itself only to webpage, 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 websites 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.