As promised, we’ve opened our invite-only beta test to the public. Interested members of the Internet searching community can register for mySidekick beta testing on our sign-up page at www.mysidekick.com/register. We will then approve and admit a limited number of beta testers for this phase of our public release. Enjoy!

If you’re a beta tester, then you know that we anticipated having to update our database once or twice during the beta test period. Well, we just released a new version of the database on Thursday evening, so you’ll once again find a clean slate to work on. All beta accounts have been restored and should be working now. Hopefully, you were off enjoying the July 4th holiday and didn’t even notice!

For all of our friends and family that have been bugging us to let you tell other people about mySidekick, we hope to open the site up for public invite-only beta testing sometime in July. Stay tuned and we’ll let you know when you can tell folks to sign up for a beta invitation.

Guest Author Nitin Karandikar over at Read/Write Web has published a list of the top 17 search innovations taking place outside of Google. As you might imagine, a few of them caught our eye, so I thought I would walk through the various innovations that we’re working on here at mySidekick.

8. Social Input

Yahoo!’s Bradley Horowitz believes social input to be a big differentiator of search technologies in the future (as does Microsoft). Aggregating inputs from a large number of users enables the search engine to benefit from the wisdom of crowds and provide high quality search results. Of course, the results may not be valid if the individual inputs are not independent or can be gamed.

Utilizing Social Input is at the core of the mySidekick system. As our Beta testers know, the mySidekick system allows the searcher to see the best results for what other people have already found about your topic across many related search requests.

Here’s how we do it: When you search for stuff online, you might change your search request a few times before you finally find what you are looking for. In fact, if you’re like the rest of us, you’ll change your search request about three to four times during an average search. MySidekick groups these search requests together as a set of “tags” that describe the topic you and other people have researched.

We then use our own relevancy algorithms to figure out exactly which sites people liked for those tags, and promote those sites as the “People’s Choice” for other mySidekick community members. When other people search for a similar topic, these tags help them more easily find what they are looking for in the People Choice’s area. The end result is better search results for everyone.

Of course, like all socially driven sites, we have to be on the lookout for gaming and have built a number of defenses against result manipulation, most of which rely on a diverse set of users and require meaningful traffic to work best.

9. Human Input

This approach is included in the list for completeness. Search engines like ChaCha are experimenting with using human operators to respond to search queries. Arguably, Yahoo! Answers is another solution in this space, although the answers are provided by other users rather than by people working for the search engine.

MySidekick also allows searchers to suggest a site that would be useful for a particular search request. If other people think the suggested site is relevant to their topic, then the site will be placed higher in the results for requests related to the suggested tags and the tags that other people find relevant to the site.

In other words, sites submitted into the mySidekick system are also forced to compete with organic search results and will either rise of fall based on their performance with real users across multiple aggregrated queries and tag sets.

14. Results refinement and Filters

Often a natural next step after a search is to drill down into the results, by further refining the search. This is different from the “keyword-tweaking” that we’ve all gotten used to with Google; it’s not just experimenting with keyword combinations to submit a new query, but rather, an attempt to actually refine the results set [akin to adding more conditions to the “where” clause of a SQL query] - this would allow users to narrow the results and converge on their desired solution.

MySidekick also automatically incorporates an interesting twist on query refinement. Basically, mySidekick automatically aggregates all of the query refinements made by searchers when they refine their various search requests during a search session.

We then analyze and use this aggregated data showing the relationships across multiple queries and between various queries and their results to cross-pollinate various search results across search requests and tag sets. If that sounds a bit complicated, it’s because it is a bit tricky to track all of this data and make sure it is properly used to provide better results for all.

An interesting quote on page 67 of the April, 2007 edition of Fast Company:

“93% of users tend to search again using a new query with similar meaning at the same search engine rather than switch to a new one.”

Source: Convera, November 2006

Our beta users will recognize that this is the premise behind mySidekick, which essentially links relevant results back to previous queries through our unique tagging and ranking system. Our end product is a set of search results that are more relevant to the next user looking for similar information.

Charles S. Knight, SEO and Richard MacManus recently published a listing of their favorite alternative search engines.

They don’t rank the search engines against one another, but instead just list them in alphabetical order. They plan to update their selections each month, along with a featured “Search Engine of the Month.”

You can check out the list for February, 2007 at the highly informative and frequently updated blog Read/WriteWeb.

We’ve been working for over 18 months to bring better search to the world and we’re proud to announce that we’ve just opened our site for private beta testing to friends and family.

If you know us, and we know you, please send us an email to gary at mysidekick.com and we’ll set you up with an account so you can start searching with mySidekick!

Welcome to the mySidekick blog!

This blog is where we will discuss the development and improvements to the mySidekick search engine. We’ve been working since August, 2005 to bring you a better search experience and we’re getting ready to launch our private beta soon.

Stay tuned as we start the discussion!