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Social Search Platform Searchles(R) Launches Site Enhancements and Secures Additional Angel Funding to Accelerate Growth

Posted on: Thursday, 8 February 2007, 10:42 CST

WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Searchles(R) (http://www.searchles.com/) -- the intelligent social search platform that gets smarter every time you use it -- today unveiled a series of group management and collaboration features that give users even more control over discovery and interactions. In addition, the company announced closing a second round of angel funding led by the original investors with new participation from Director Mark Walsh -- a pioneer of Internet and new media concerns known for leading hyper growth in emerging markets.

"We are rapidly rolling out new features that keep people better connected to their trusted network of peers and the content they care about through the intuitive power of social search," said Elias Shams, CEO of Searchles. "This funding will help further fuel enhancements, growth of our loyal user community and advancement of strategic partnerships."

Every Searchles user receives their own personal bookmarks site when they register to track their personal interests and share with friends. As they bookmark, tag or assign content to groups at Searchles, they are essentially creating their own vertical topical search engines on the fly -- making their content easier to discover not only at Searchles but across the Internet. Unlike other social sites that limit discovery through a "wisdom of the masses" approach, Searchles empowers users to determine who influences their discovery efforts, when and how through networks of trust.

Today, these features are even more robust with new group management capability. A user who creates or "owns" a group at Searchles now has a series of tools for moderating participation and content. These include:

* Open participation -- allows any user to join your group and post content. * Invitation only -- enables group owners to specify exactly who can join their group and post content. By limiting participation to just yourself, or to an exclusive group of friends or experts, group owners can create a highly trustable and searchable index on any given topic. * Request to join -- enables any user to ask to join a group of interest and the group owner can then accept or reject the request. This vetting process ensures the integrity of group content and exposes all members to new peers that genuinely share expertise or common interests. * Management Dashboards -- enable group owners to specify or change participation preferences at any time. Group owners can also grant management privileges to other trusted members, ban specific users, specific content or all of a specific user's content if they deem it to be inappropriate or irrelevant to their group. For more in depth information on group management enhancements, please visit: http://www.searchles.com/misc/help/groups.

In addition, Searchles also unveiled a new home page today that more prominently recognizes "top groups" and "top people" within the community. These rankings were developed using proprietary algorithms that analyze recent posting activity, the quality of the posts, and the number of trusted users within a user's personal network or within a particular group along with activity across their extended network.

Today's announcement follows closely on the heels of Searchles' recently released push-me/pull-me widget: http://www.searchles.com/misc/widget. Designed to help bloggers, online media and social networks keep their audience engaged longer on their own websites, it is the first social widget that doesn't take the user off the source page to bookmark, tag, share or comment on content. The Searchles widget automatically pushes and pulls tags and comments back to the source page, and recommends related content from the source site and elsewhere.

To support the company's aggressive plans, Searchles is currently seeking to fill several new programming and technical positions with a particular emphasis on qualified applicants who have information retrieval or Ruby on Rails expertise. For more information: http://www.searchles.com/misc/careers.

About Searchles

Searchles is a highly scaleable "social search" platform that showcases expertise, enables collaboration with peers and instantly captures it in searchable knowledge indexes. The platform is a hybrid, combining aspects of "social bookmarking" and "social networking" technology with analytical "social search" capability to allow for network search.

Network search enables users to discover content with personalized filtering features that include tags, keywords or a combination of both, as well as the ability to apply these same filters to search all postings, groups, friends, or friends' friends based on each user's personal criteria. By analyzing the associations and patterns between trusted people, sources, tags and content, Searchles is able to deliver more precise, relevant results while suggesting content and people related to each user's interests.

The proprietary technology behind Searchles is an evolution of the search engine Dumbfind, developed by veteran search technologist and Searchles' founder and CTO Chris Seline. Both brands are wholly-owned by Searchles, Inc., a privately-held company based in Washington, D.C. backed by angel investors. http://www.searchles.com/

Searchles Media Contact: Amy M. Smith, WhiteOak Communications (703) 200-8218 asmith (at) whiteoakcom.com

Searchles

CONTACT: Amy M. Smith of WhiteOak Communications, +1-703-200-8218,asmith (at) whiteoakcom.com, for Searchles

Web site: http://www.searchles.com/http://blog.searchles.com/

Source: PRNewswire

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