Phew. So here’s our Social Search Alpha. As the title of this blog post says, it’s the first ever crowd-powered search engine. So what does that mean for you?

Me.dium’s Social Search enables our users to find relevant information based on the current surfing activity of other people. In other words, your search results are heavily influenced by what people are actually looking at online right now. This means we tend to surface news, reviews, pictures and videos that are hot, right now, according to crowds of people just like you. And as the activity of the crowds change, as the zeitgeist of the online community shifts, so do Me.dium’s search results. With Me.dium, you’ll always get a real view into what matters to the crowds right now.

It’s easy to join the crowds – to start influencing the search results that other people see. All you have to do is download our Social Toolbar and start surfing. Just over 2 million people have already done exactly that since we first launched it in August ‘07. The Me.dium Social Toolbar allows you to Surf the Web with your friends, see where your friends are online, communicate across web pages and – of course – search together. At the same time, you’re also helping Me.dium determine what web pages are hot right now, and which web pages are related to various terms. We build our search index in real-time from this aggregate and anonymous information. This means real people’s surfing activity, rather than robotic crawlers, determine what’s important and relevant in Me.dium’s Social Search index.

The other exciting aspect to this launch is the work we’re doing “under the hood” with Yahoo!

Me.dium’s Social Search leverages the Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) open web services platform. You can read more about what Yahoo are doing here. By leveraging Yahoo!’s Search infrastructure, we’re able to provide an entirely new level of crowd-powered information on top of fully comprehensive search results. This means our users get the best of both worlds.

Now… in the best traditions of “Alpha”, we’ve worked fast to get our product out there for you to play with, test, discuss, and let us know what you’d like to see next. Our Alpha is raw, there are a few bugs, and it only hints at what we have planned. But we hope it’s enough for you to get a feel for what we’re trying to do – i.e. bring crowd-powered search to the web.

We’d love it if you left a comment on this blog, Twitter us, or even popped in to our offices to have a chat. We’re looking forward to hearing what you have to say, and using that feedback to help us evolve Me.dium Social Search.

Check out what the media are saying here:

New York Times

Businessweek

Readwriteweb

VentureBeat

Search engine land

MarketWatch

Mashable

Webware