SOURCE: Searchles

 

WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwire - January 5, 2009) - Searchles® -- the intelligent social search and social networking platform that gets smarter every time you use it -- today added The Denver Post to the list of major news portals that have partnered with Searchles Discovery® technology as a social enabler to enhance the networking abilities and interactivity of their online readerships. Searchles' Related Users widget, launched on both article and user-profile pages, facilitates the discovery of trusted peers with similar interests within the denverpost.com community. This social solution is designed to breakdown barriers to conversation and meaningful content discovery by giving readers the ability to easily harness the collective recommendations and activities of these related users.

"We're constantly looking for new ways to make our content more accessible and relevant to our readers," said Mark Cardwell, Managing Editor of Digital Media at The Denver Post. "We see value in surfacing related users not only in the ability to connect and engage our like-minded readers, but also in the ability to tap into these user networks to access deeply personalized content recommendations beyond what any web-based algorithm could produce."

Intelligent search technology, based on natural language processing developed by Searchles, automatically extracts relevant concepts from the content a reader is consuming and matches up corresponding data to identify the meaningful links between related users with high instances of similar tags or related users to a particular article. By surfacing these connections via widget and promoting their online community on content pages, the result is that the denverpost.com web site becomes more personalized and engaging, encouraging readers to spend more time and view more pages. This gives the media companies opportunities for additional revenue.

"The Denver Post is a trusted news source that has taken smart moves to create a rich online community around their content in the Neighbors section of their site," said Elias Shams, CEO of Searchles. "We're excited to play a role in their next steps towards an even more compelling user experience, while also giving a boost to their bottom line."

The Related Users widget is part of Searchles Discovery® technology that is geared towards online publishers, bloggers, and social network sites and priced based on a revenue-share working scenario. Searchles Discovery tools offer a set of customizable solutions for increasing user interaction, realizing full value of site content by using it as a foundation to build and utilize networks of trusted peers, as well as enhancing social search features and capabilities for targeted advertising. This partnership will allow The Denver Post to further personalize their online presence and to push forward as a leader in transforming traditional media consumption into a genuinely social online experience.

About The Denver Post

Founded in 1892, The Denver Post has been Colorado's media leader for over a century. As Colorado's largest daily broadsheet newspaper, more people get their news and information from The Denver Post and denverpost.com than any other source. The Sunday Denver Post, with a total paid circulation of 600,026, is the ninth-largest newspaper in America. In June 2008, denverpost.com was ranked by Google Trends Lab as Colorado's No. 1 website, receiving more unique visitors than any other site in the state.

About Searchles

[Search + Circles =] Searchles is a highly scaleable "social search" platform that showcases expertise, enables collaboration with peers and instantly captures it in searchable knowledge indexes. The platform is a hybrid, combining aspects of "social bookmarking" and "social networking" technology with analytical "social search" capability to allow for network search.

Network search enables users to discover content with personalized filtering features that include tags and keywords, as well as the ability to apply these same filters to search all postings, groups, friends, or friends' friends based on each user's personal criteria. By analyzing the associations and patterns between trusted people, sources, tags and content, Searchles is able to deliver more precise results while suggesting relevant content and people as well.

The proprietary technology behind Searchles is an evolution of the search engine Dumbfind, developed by veteran search technologist and Searchles' founder and CTO Chris Seline. Both brands are wholly-owned by Searchles, Inc., a privately-held company based in Washington, D.C. backed by angel investors. http://www.searchles.com