Online social networks might soon be more than a way to meet people: the sites your MySpace buddies view could sharpen up your web search results.
Search engines index the web using “spider” software that crawls from site to site by following links from existing pages. However, this was just not personal enough for computer scientist Alan Mislove of Rice University in Houston, Texas. With colleagues in Germany, he has developed PeerSpective, which creates a personalised list of results by recording the pages viewed by members of a social network and bringing the pages up when another member of the group searches for a similar topic.…
