Search seems to be a major topic of interest lately, given the real time search trend and the major changes being made to companies like Facebook and Google. So why is it notable when a new search engine emerges? Lavva has unveiled its new search engine, which is a social experiment of sorts for the way in which we rank and consume search engine results.
Lavva takes on a simplistic interface similar to Google, and allows you to select which type of media you’d like to include in your search results. Web, images, video, news, or all of the above. It’s a handy attempt at personalized search results, but potentially unnecessary when you consider the all-encompassing format that gives users multiple media types, often giving them results they may not have thought to consider. It also slows down the overall search process, even if ever so slightly.
Each search result can be voted up or down. You also have the option of leaving a comment. If you sign in (which can be done via Facebook, Twitter, AOL, MySpace, Google or Yahoo), you can add a little more weight to your voting, and leave comments. There’s also a preview option so you can see the web page, image, or video before clicking through to the full site.
The main tabs on Lavva give you a couple different options when it comes to your search results. You can see everything at once in a basic format, or make things a little more social with the option of viewing search results in a list format with RSS subscription options and the ability to share your search results across various areas of the social web. Another option to go Social Live gives you a taste of real time search capabilities, which not surprisingly includes Twitter integration.
The ability to “go social” with your search results is something we’ve seen hints of with other search engines, such as Twitter’s ability to tweet your results, or Google Reader’s ability to share items with friends. I think we’ll see many more search engines find better ways of incorporating the social web into search, making it easier to share items with friends, archive certain results, offer recommendations and ultimately personalize your search experience. We’re seeing glimmers of this with Bing, Microsoft’s latest search project.
But that’s about where the highlights of Lavva end. As a social search engine Lavva is heavily reliant on gaining a wide and diverse user base, which is tricky in this day and age. What would help Lavva see some traction is additional integration with the established sites out there–Twitter and Facebook. Taking advantage of the populations and social graphs already present on these sites may help Lavva, though other search engines that relied solely on such integration failed in the end. It’s all still experimental, but perhaps a balance of these two aspects of social search could provide a success story.
The other notable aspect of Lavva is the fact that it’s an environmentally friendly company, using data centers that are lower on carbon emissions, among other green considerations. Could this initiative, plus its trademark Social Algorithm, make Lavva an attractive company to users as well as investors? Depending on the direction in which Lavva decides to take its next steps, we may see some interesting results from this little social experiment.
