When you search for something on most search engines, you’re placing your confidence in the algorithm that the engine uses to provide the best results. In the case of search engines like Google, this usually works fairly well, but the lack of a social element can begin to make you feel like the results don’t truly mean anything to other people, so why should you care about them? We place our trust in machines for a lot of things, but it doesn’t always have to be this way with Web searches. With 50 Matches, you’ll only get results that have been recommended by other people.

The name 50 Matches implies that a maximum of fifty results are delivered for each query, which should be all that you need. Instead of using a system where the engine returns generic results and then the users vote on the best ones through the site, 50 Matches actually indexes sites that have been bookmarked and voted on through services like Digg and del.icio.us. This is a great idea for social search, but unfortunately, their implementation doesn’t work very well at all, and instead of receiving the type of quality results that you see on the aforementioned services, most of them just feel like rubbish. Hopefully this mention will encourage the developers to further develop the idea because it’s a good one.

[tags]50 Matches, Search Engines, Google, Social Search, Google, Digg, Del.icio.us[/tags]