What is Seekmash?
Seekmash is a social search engine launched in 2008 that aims to improve the search experience by incorporating social signals and recommendations. When a user performs a search on Seekmash, they not only see the normal organic results, but also personalized recommendations from their social connections on which results may be more useful or interesting.
Users can connect their Seekmash account to their profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. If any of their contacts have shared, commented on, or liked a search result in the past, Seekmash will highlight that result and note which friend recommended it. This allows users to leverage their social circle when research topics they care about.
Seekmash essentially adds a 'social layer' to search. So users get the traditional search engine results from crawling and indexing the web, blended with input from their network of friends and contacts. The premise is that people you know give better, more trustworthy recommendations than anonymous search engine algorithms.
Some key features of Seekmash include:
- Social search feed with personalized real-time recommendations
- Social trending topics and viral content based on social shares
- User tagging and categorization to improve future search
- Chrome extension to easily activate social search from any browser
Seekmash aimed to tap into growing consumer comfort with social searching. However, it failed to gain significant traction among mainstream consumers. In 2022 the company stopped operating the search engine, though the underlying technology may find use in other vertical search applications.