After months of development, we’ve finally finished the changes to Decipho! The biggest feature we’ve added to Decipho is building a social network into search. We’ve got all the basic social network features added and you can now do your web searches with your friends.

One of the main features Decipho has is filtering search results by tags. By doing this users have the ability to narrow keyword searches by tags given by other users and themselves. For example, if you do a search for “web 2.0″ and type in “news” into the tag search bar:

When the results come back, it only displays websites within this search that were given the tag news by other users. The Community Tags link next to the displayed search results allow users to view all of the tags given for a particular website as well as a percentage breakdown of how many times someone tagged a website a certain tag-word. At the bottom it will show the breakdown of tags used for a particular keyword search. If a tag was given to a particular website and it does not appear in the keyword search breakdown, it is because the tags were loaded from their browser or they may have used our bookmarklet.

Another unique feature we offer is the My Results section. While logged into their account, when a keyword search pulls up a website the user has already ranked for another keyword search, the system will pull out that search listing and display it at the top right side (next to general results) even if it is listing number 50. This will help our users narrow their searches by tags and will only display results that match particular tags.

Another addition is the Friends section in the search results. Every time a user does a search while logged in, Decipho will process all of the results and search for any websites that were tagged by a friend. If it finds a match, it will pull out the result and place it in the Friends Results section while displaying which friends tagged this website, what they tagged it as and any notes they added about it.

Also in the user admin area users can network and befriend other users. Users can browse user-profiles within Decipho; they can view the websites other users tagged and any websites they may own. Another way of finding and adding friends is through the section where Decipho suggests friends to users that have similar search and tag behaviors. Within the Friends section, users can also see who has befriended them and who has befriended other users. Users also have the ability to make their account private so other users cannot see them, or they can make certain tags and websites private while still being able to add friends.

Hope you check it out and like the changes we’ve made!

Last week the new Microsoft search engine Bing launched and got a lot of positive press. Bing has a lot of cool features and has a chance to be a major player in the search game. Below is the Microsoft video describing the features of Bing.com.

It looks like Yahoo is taking a page out of Powersets playbook. It looks like when you do a search it now offers you enhanced Wikipedia results. Below is a screenshot of one example that I’m seeing.

Yahoo Tech Ticker has an interview with Jason Kilar the CEO of Hulu up on their site and it has a lot of good info on whats going on with them. Hulu is the major competitor to Youtube and has partnered with the big media companies to allow them to show their content and has become a huge success. You can see the video interview and more here and if you have time you should definitely check it out. Hulu is one of my favorite sites that I check out at least once a week, to get caught up on 24, and it’s always interesting to hear what a CEO has to say about the state of their company. Below is another video interview of Jason done by Kara Swisher a couple of weeks ago.

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This morning I’ve in my Google searches I’ve been seeing a Search Tools link above my search results that lets me narrow my searches and filter out the information. Below you can see a screenshot of the tool and I think it’s pretty cool how you can filter out the results with different options.

It looks like Yahoo is testing out a whole new homepage design. Looks like they are really trying to push their apps and Ebay in this new redesign which can be seen below.

Not sure how new it is but it is the first time I’ve seen it. It’s still a lower case G but it has the Google colors in the background. Check it out for yourself when you get a chance.

ReadWriteWeb has a great post here that comes up out with the origins of popular Web 2.0 terms. My favorite one has to be the one for FTW:

FTW is most commonly understood as standing for “For the Win!” The Urban Dictionary says it entered popular culture via the TV show Hollywood Squares. The show featured two contestants playing a trivia based tic-tac-toe game where the squares had celebrities siting in them who “helped” answer the questions.

The final question to complete the tic-tac-toe was asked “for the win…” The show ran from 1966 through 1981 but there were several attempts to revive it.

Techcrunch is reporting that Yahoo will join Google’s Opensocial. Should be interesting since Yahoo is really trying to open up their search results

I didn’t get a chance to go to the Web 2.0 Expo this past week but Richard at ReadWriteWeb has a good breakdown of what happened.

Web 2.0 Expo Summary