Introducing Worio

Worio is a hot-off-the-presses social search engine that just sprouted up out of Vancouver, Canada.  They just opened things up for the public a few days ago and I was lucky enough to be introduced to it by Ben, (yet another one..) one of their core developers last night.  Here is a screenshot of the search page.

What you get on the left (orange) side:

• Normal search engine results (you can use other engine's from their search bar if you like) and the opportunity to tag the results and to give them thumbs up or thumbs down votes

What you get on the right (blue) side:

• "Social search engine" results in the form of Web pages they think you might be interested in based what you and your "friends" have tagged and have given the thumbs up to

What you get on the top right:

• A tag cloud extracted from the search results and from your own tag library which can be used to filter the results of the search

Aside from the search engine aspect, Worio is also a social bookmarking service, complete with bookmarklet and all.  Its a perfect demonstration of why I'm interested in social tagging.  When I search for e.g. "Mark Wilkinson" I usually am not interested in the English zoologist, but rather a Canadian bioinformatician that happens to be my advisor.  By learning about who I am and what I'm interested in, social search can much more effectively help me find what I am looking for.

Good show, Worio !  Now if I could just get them to start using the Entity Describer in their tagging... ;)