Mitch’s posterous

I'm an inveterate knowledge hound.  As much as web search has changed my life for finding information, when it comes to learning about a topic I know nothing about, Google isn't enough.  Sometimes I want a fact or an answer, and Google is terrific, but often I'm looking to become better informed generally.  Of course I go to Wikipedia whenever I can for this, but that's a beginning not an ending.  I know that terrific sites on my topic of interest exist, but how do I discover them…  That's why the Xmarks team built SearchTabs.

Suppose you are interested in learning more about health care reform.  It might be because you are student with an assignment or that you want simply to know more about what all of the shouting is really about.  The first page of Google results on "health care reform" consist entirely of news items from ABC, CNN, Fox and other media sources and two official U.S. government sites.  These links are very relevant but what's missing are links to sites with general information about the topic of health care reform.

This is where SearchTabs comes in.  SearchTabs is a lightweight Firefox add-on that augments Google search results to help you discover the best sites on any topic.

Here’s my “health care reform” search with SearchTabs installed:

Clicking on the “Health Care Reform” tab shows me the top ten sites on this topic:

Results are drawn from a distillation of a billion bookmarks saved by users of our Xmarks bookmark synchronization add-on.  We analyze many factors including how many people have bookmarked a particular site as well as what folder(s) they store them in.  Out of this we compute a rank within topic of the top sites for each of more than 175,000 
English-language topics.

You may have noticed in the first screen shot that we also analyze the ten sites on Google’s page and augment those site links with flags showing how those sites rank in their primary topic. A perfect example of this is a Google search on “Ubuntu”. Among the Google results I see this:

SearchTabs instantly helps me differentiate the Linux forums site from the similarly named Napa Valley restaurant. I get the added “signal” of understanding how these sites rank in their topic. Clicking on a flag takes me right to a tab where I can see the top ranking sites, all without leaving my search results page.

The insight we had as we were developing SearchTabs is that discovery should be thought of as an augmentation of search, not a substitute or complement.  By adding easily clickable tabs to the Google search results page, it allows the user to surface the best general sites as identified through the wisdom of crowds.

The technical team at Xmarks has done a great job of automatically identifying relevant topics from the actual search strings typed in, so users do not need to put in any extra effort to get these additional results.  To be clear, SearchTabs results come from a different corpus than Google's which makes it different than virtually every other search-related add-on out there.  We're not reprocessing Google results; we're drawing from the billion bookmarks we've analyzed.

SearchTabs is still in early beta and has some rough edges. You may see duplicate or irrelevant topics on occasion. If so, you can easily flag them and help contribute to the collective wisdom that SearchTabs is built upon.

Please check out SearchTabs and let me know what you think.