Search Assist Review - Fast Company Edition by Tomer Molovinsky

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PerfSpot - PredictAd team up to power social search..

With all the buzz surrounding Facebook it is easy to overlook PerfSpot - a wildly successful social network that boasts more than 30 million unique users worldwide. I think a lot of PerfSpot's success is based on it offering social networking applications with more of a portal-like feel to the site. Unlike Facebook, I can very easily stream music, watch online videos or search through local classified ads. This is a much more user-friendly style of web-surfing than browsing through endless Facebook apps that too often have limited functionality and often frustrate due to Facebook's slow response time.

Less than a month ago PredictAd and PerfSpot teamed up in order to power their video, music, blog and groups search. PredictAd geo-targets the search suggestions it displays on PerfSpot to over 230 countries. So if someone from Canada, and another person from India begin searching for music they will see different suggestions displayed based on what is most popular in that geographic location.



Beyond just improving the search experience on PerfSpot - PredictAd's community-powered search suggestions offer a new approach to searching on social networks, which falls under the category of "social search". Wikipedia defines social networks as a

service [that] focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Think about it, all the buzz about social networks is the USG (user-generated content) factor, so why shouldn't the search powering these social networks adapt the same modus operandi? Well, it seems as if one of the more successful social networks is in tune with this thought process - and kudos to PerfSpot for setting the trend!