IE8 features Me.dium’s Social Search
Me.dium, a social software company, today announced that its Social Search service , the first crowd-powered search engine, will be integrated into Microsoft’s new Windows IE8 Beta 2. Me.dium joins EBay, Facebook, and Yahoo as featured partners for IE8’s Beta 2 launch today. Microsoft has chosen Me.dium as a launch partner because of the unique value it provides to search, and Medium’s ability to help IE8 take the web experience “beyond the page.”
Me.dium’s Social Search has a unique ability to harness the activity of the crowds to let users find information that has relevance based on what people are actually looking at right now. This enhances Microsoft’s IE8 promises to deliver the best browser for what people do every day, making that experience faster, easier and safer than ever. Searching is the most commonly performed task on the web. By featuring Me.dium’s innovative search experience, IE8 now provides the user with an entirely new level of crowd-powered information on top of traditional search, and helps users to keep up with what’s hot, and see recommendations ranked by what people are actually looking at; reflecting the changing interests of the online community.
“Because Me.dium’s Social Search results are ranked by what people are actually looking at in the moment, we’re able to surface news, reviews, pictures and videos that are hot right now. And as the zeitgeist of the online community changes, so do the search results,” said Kimball Musk, CEO of Me.dium. “IE8 provides the perfect platform to keep up with what’s hot using the Me.dium IE8 search service. Type a term into IE8’s Search box, and Me.dium returns a list of results showing the hottest pages online right now relevant to your query. Me.dium also provides visual indicators next to each search result, letting you know if the page is increasing or decreasing in hotness, and how long people tend to spend on each page, keeping you in the know, without you having to leave your browser.”
In addition to adding social ranking to IE8’s Search offerings, Me.dium’s integration with IE8 includes the Me.dium What’s Hot Webslice and the Me.dium Discovery Accelerator, weaving crowd-powered relevance throughout the user’s experience. Also, along with the aforementioned features, the Me.dium Social Toolbar will continue to be a featured recommendation on Microsoft’s new IE Add-Ons website (www.ieaddons.com):
The Me.dium What’s Hot Webslice, first demoed at MIX08, allows users to keep up with what’s hot, right within their IE8 browser. The WebSlice updates frequently with hot website recommendations influenced by the surfing behavior of Me.dium’s users. Editors at Me.dium add their own personal touch to publish this guide to the hottest pages online right now.
The Me.dium Discovery Accelerator takes the user “beyond the page” to discover new content. The user highlights a keyword on any webpage and, with a simple right-click of the mouse, opens up the Me.dium Discovery Accelerator – a small window packed full of socially-driven content recommendations related to the highlighted term. From there, the user can click on a link in the window and be taken to a new, related web page.
The Me.dium Social Toolbar Add-on shows off IE’s extensibility. Enabling users to surf the web with friends, “follow” each other to discover new content, and chat about what they are seeing in real-time; the Social Toolbar also features deep Facebook integration, so users can send messages and share content with their Facebook friends as they surf the web. Additionally, the Social Toolbar offers users content recommendations related to the pages they are currently browsing.
Me.dium Social Search – Visual Search: Find the hottest news, reviews, pictures and videos. Simply install Me.dium’s Visual Search service, then type a term into IE8’s Search box - Me.dium will display a list of results showing the hottest pages online right now relevant to your query.
Me.dium also provides visual indicators next to each search result, letting you know if the page is increasing or decreasing in hotness, and how long people tend to spend on each page.
Me.dium launched its alpha version of Social Search in partnership with BOSS (Build Your Own Search Engine) a new web service platform offered by Yahoo!. Me.dium’s Social Search provides highly differentiated results from traditional search engines. While other search engines base relevance on how content links across pages, Me.dium’s Social Search shows you the most popular news, reviews, pictures and videos that other people are actually looking at in relation to your search term.
