The trend of searching your social network for information is going to be with us for a while. Facebook is clearly interested in improving its own search engine to provide a relevant social graph for each individual. And others in this space include Search Wikia, Rollyo (search sites you trust) and Eureskster (customize a search a topic, and share and distribute the social search widget). In the UK, new startup RecommendBox is taking a different approach – building a database of searchable recommendations in a private network. Evernote (US) and Spheers (UK) are yet more attempts at this.
The latest entrant to this space is Nsyght a boostrapped UK startup now in public Beta which launched a low-level Alpha back in October. Nsyght wants to take your bookmarks and social network and use those to create more relevant search results.
The site features ‘Social Network Portability’ (xfn+hcard) support, so users can import their profile and friends data from digg, last.fm, twitter, and pownce. Users can also import or export to del.icio.us or ma.gnolia and simpy.
Try a search on “iPhone development” across Wikia, Nsyght and Google. Nsyght comes off pretty well – and they don’t have anywhere close to Wikia’s funding.
The new public beta has a clean, Google-esque interface and a number of new features like Tag support and integration with the new Clickpass service. I’d say this is still a site for geeks/early adopters, but definitely one to watch. There’s a longer review on TechCrunch UK.