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Gnosh: Think Dim-Sum for the web

For the last few months, we've been working on a social-software search engine, which we've called Gnosh.

Gnosh is cool because it searches a ton of different search engines and resources to collect information about a certain topic. For example, if you put in "ipod shuffle," you will get data from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Flickr, Del.icio.us, IceRocket, Google Blog Search, Amazon, you name it. And it's all presented in a nice, easy to use format.

There are lots of other cool features too. If you make an account, Gnosh keeps track of your searches, and lets you mark things as favorites. You can then put the RSS feeds of your history and favorites into your feed reader for quick access to a search term, while still getting the most up-to-date results.

Ken Bolton from the Vassar Media Cloisters and I came up with the concept at a meeting of the Social Software Users Group held at the Center for Educational Technology in Middlebury, Vermont in January 2005. We came up with a very quick and dirty proof-of-concept that night, and when I returned to Allegheny, our team here would work on it in our spare cycles. You can also mark users as friends and see what they are searching as well.

Seriously, and I'm not saying this because it's my baby, it's a really, really cool tool that lets you get information quickly and easily from across the web.

Much of the credit for the current incarnation goes to Jesse Hixson and Peter Shafer, who have done the majority of the code development. They've written hooks into all kinds of API's, wrote amazing custom caching tools, wrote most of the social networking layer and have done all sorts of neat stuff for Gnosh. So, thanks, boys.

So that's it. Go and try it. We're adding new tools all the time (Digg.com, Last.fm, Technorati).

I'm also presenting Gnosh at the HighEdWebDev conference next week in Rochester, NY in a poster session. If you're attending, stop by and say hello.

Posted by Mike at November 3, 2005 11:02 AM | Add to del.icio.us