April 25, 2005
Multiply launches Social Network Search Engine
The social networking service Multiply just announced the launch of their social search application, allowing the user to search for content that has been published by people connected to the user.
This is an interesting approach to search. Traditional search engines have to deal with a great ammount of spam. Pagerank once was actually introduced to score a site based on the number of other pages linking to it. While this worked quite well for some time, it is by now subject to a lot of manipulation. The Multiply approach tries to take into account who is responsible for some web ressource, and how much reason there is for the person searching to trust the publisher, i.e. if that pubisher is part of the searchers social network. I wonder if Google is ever going to move Orkut in some similar direction.
By the way, I do have a Multiply Page for some time now, but never made much use of this. Maybe I should investigate this further.
Press Release