Yesterday I spoke with David Mandell about Me.dium Social Search.  Mandell is the founder of Me.dium and the service sounds very exciting.  Me.dium Social Search is the first crowd-powered search engine.  Most traditional search engines rely on algorithms, but this is the first time that a crowd determines the relevance of search engine results.

Me.dium’s first product, the Me.dium Sidebar has been downloaded over 2 million times and receives about 500,000 uniques per month.  Me.dium users are sharing over 20 million URLs per day and the company is able to harness this information to power a search engine with solid results.

“Me.dium’s Social Search gives you a new and unique layer of information that was never available before,” stated Kimbal Musk, the CEO of Me.dium. “Using the activity of our community and our real time technology platform, users see search results ranked by what the crowds are surfing right now.”

What makes this search engine revolutionary is that importance of URLs are determined in real-time.  When an explicit action happens, then the importance of a link is increase.  For example, if a YouTube video of Barack Obama is gaining in popularity, it will start rising to the top of the search because others are looking at the video at the same time.

Me.dium Social Search complements the Social Tool Bar.  Below are a couple of screen shots of the search engine in action:

Muhammad Saleem, a guest author on ReadWriteWeb, a top Digg user, and an employee of Advantage Consulting Services wrote a post not too long ago about why social news sites must implement social search.

“Social search is the future. And socially driven content sites - with their massive indexes of websites, huge communities and decent social networking features, and ample information on user habits and preferences (based on past behavior) - are in the best position to take the lead,” wrote Saleem on ReadWriteWeb.  “Ultimately, imagine a combination of Digg, Google, Facebook, and Techmeme. To the minute, timely content, large index and approximately 20,000 or more new submissions indexed per day (this works fine for a smaller, Mahalo-level search engine), the best content is promoted to the top by an active community of millions of networked users, and conversation-mapping based on content promotion, comments, and search habits on the site.”

This is exactly what Me.dium Social Search is doing and it’s going to be big.  If you have any questions about Me.dium, leave a comment and I’ll route the question to Mr. Mandell.

The alpha version of the site is available at http://me.dium.com/search/

Me.dium[1], a Boulder, Colorado based company announced today that they have raised $15 million in funding. Me.dium utilizes chatting functionality with visualization effects combined with location tracking.

An example that the company gives for use their service is that Me.dium “lets you see where your friends are online right now. Like when you get together with your friends at the mall to do some shopping, now you can do that online. Only, for the first time, you don’t even have to be in the same store to do it[2] .”

The $15 million in Series B was led by several investors. Waltham, Massachusetts based firm, Commonwealth Capital Ventures[3] lead the investment. Spark Capital[4], Appian Ventures[5], and Brad Feld, a managing director at Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, also participated in the $15 million investment. Elon Musk, a founder of Paypal was a previous investor of Me.dium’s $5 million Series A funding.

Me.dium was founded in June 2006. “We believe Me.dium is pioneering the next phase of social interaction on the Web,” stated Elliott Katzman,a general partner at Commonwealth. “With a proven technology and a world-class management team, Me.dium is well-positioned to lead this exciting new category.” Katzman will join the Me.dium Board of Directors.

Every Me.dium user has the power to turn on and off the service for privacy. This way users can decide whether they want their information shared.

“Commonwealth Capital Ventures clearly shared our vision on the evolution of how people will interact online,” stated Kimbal Musk, the CEO of Me.dium. “We are excited to have them lead this round and join our existing investor team. Their proven understanding of the consumer was critical in our financing decision and was a clear value Commonwealth brought to the table.”

[1] me.dium.com
[2] me.dium.com/company
[3] ccvlp.com
[4] sparkcapital.com
[5] appianvc.com