by Michelle Lentz

Me.dium is a new social search engine, recently launched in alpha. Me.dium uses real people, as opposed to bots, when determining relevance in a search. Similar to how Summize, er, Twitter Search shows what people are twittering in real time, Me.dium’s Social Search results show what people are surfing and find interesting at this moment.

The search engine builds its search indexes as people surf the web. As people visit a site, and spend time and attention on it, the site gets ranked higher within seconds. As a result, when you enter a search term, the Me.dium Search results are sorted and presented based on what people are actually looking at in relation to your search term – in essence, where the crowds are online and what they’ve found relevant and useful in relation to your search term.

Who are these crowds? The crowds are the folks using the Me.dium Social Toolbar, which the company notes has been downloaded by more than 2 million people. Users of the Me.dium Social Toolbar determine what Web pages are important right now, and how Me.dium Social Search should rank them.

The search page has two options: Search and I Feel Social.

- The Search button provides crowd-based results based on Me.dium’s Social Search technology, combined with traditional search engine results.

- The I Feel Social button displays search results based solely on crowd activity. Each result also includes a number of icons that provide information about how recently the pages were visited, how many people are there now, whether the number of people visiting the page is increasing or decreasing, and how long people spend on the page.

–
Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

Tagged as: crowd search, search, social search