Nsyght – New Funding Invigorates Social Search Engine

Nsyght, the social search engine based in London, spurred by a round of VC funding to the tune of $200k, has been re-invigorated by founder Geoffrey McCaleb after the project was shelved in 2008.

With three developers working out of Turkey, they’ve been in stealth mode up until they’re recent re-launch at the ChristmasCrunch event last week.

McCaleb showcased the combination of it’s social aggregator and search facilities that can expose content from right across your social landscape, with live updates to boot.  With this being the initial release, McCaleb promised many more features and tweaks to it’s algorithm are on the way.

“Next month, we will have a major release where we will start flexing the muscles of our social algorithm, which will be pretty interesting stuff. Over the short term we will add more providers and minor features to improve the capability of the platform.”

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Summarising Nsyght, McCaleb describes it as. “The net effect is that we can make a users’ social network truly portable so they do not have to re-discover friends they already are connected with.”

By being able to push and pull content from your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Last.fm, Delicious and StumbleUpon (takes a breath) accounts, provides a fantastic map of the reach your online identity has.

Nsyght not only provides the aforementioned live updates but it’s main point of call, it’s search facility, through a self developed algorithm is the star of the show and judging by the results, has good potential.

With threaded discussions, video and photo embedding as well as the social aggregator functionality described earlier, it reminds me of a number of products I’ve used and reviewed over the course of the year. Think of a cross between Redux, Brizzly and the Twitter web client itself – but with a cross platform search function to bring it all together.

The search functionality, is very astute and evidently technically advanced, with searches through the ‘Everyone’ tab for ‘project canvas’ and ‘the next web’ coming up trumps across the various content channels mentioned above. In comparison with similar searches on Google with their recently released social search functionality, it returned positive results too.

I feel though, to make a real differential and stand out, they need to focus on making it feel like either an aggregator or social search engine and with the former being a heavily congested market, I’d go for the latter.

There’s no reason why they can’t provide both successfully, but the internet community and it’s stereotypical tendencies expect a search engine to look and behave a certain way.  By concentrating on the way their search facility is presented to the user, they could well drive further traction and importantly scope a dedicated and loyal audience to them.

There is a very good reason to give Nsyght a go, the sign up process.  You can sign in with your Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, OpenID and (another breath, these guys love integration) ClickPass.  Keep an eye out on it too, as it sounds like there will be regular and meaningful updates in the coming weeks and months that could continue to  and add real value to your social landscape exploration.