Tickle Inc. today announced the launch of Tickle People Search, the first Internet search service that gives you relevant web results and links you to people who are experts or interested in what you’re searching for. By taking into account who you are and what you’re interested in, Tickle’s innovative People Search technology brings back people results ranked by relevance to you.
“Before the Internet, people would research most topics by asking others for advice and information,” said James Currier, CEO of Tickle Inc. “The advent of Web search in the 1990’s taught us to query text data pages instead of talking with each other. Tickle People Search brings online search full circle, back to letting us find the right people to talk to.”
For example, if your friend wants to refinance her house and searches for “mortgage” on Tickle People Search, she will get web links for mortgage information, plus a list of people she knows — or people who know people she knows — who have expertise in mortgages. She can then contact them directly for advice, making it much easier and more personal for her to find the information she needs.
Human interaction continues to play a major role in the way people make decisions. In a survey of 2,500 individuals, 70 percent said they still rely on personal referrals from someone they trust as well as independent research before making purchasing decisions. By bringing people into the search results, Tickle is enhancing the overall online search experience, adding a human touch to an otherwise impersonal process.
Be found when you want to be found
Tickle’s People Search results are pulled from more than 2 million profiles in the Tickle Social Network. Growing virally at an average rate of 15,000 members per day, the Tickle Social Network is the world’s second largest social networking service — in part because Tickle features the deepest, most comprehensive user profiles available on the web. Anyone can create a profile within the Tickle social networking system simply by signing up for a free Tickle membership.
Tickle members who have a knowledge base they want to share with others can simply add relevant information into their profiles so they can be found by individuals looking for their specific capabilities. For example, a mortgage broker’s profile might include details about her background, her experience, her employer and more — making it easier for people who need mortgage information to find and contact her. Tickle People Search results will only display details that individuals want to share with others — information people want to keep private will not be included.
Tickle P2 — the ranking algorithm that finds you the right people
Led by PhDs and experts in social science and psychology, the Tickle Research Group has conducted years of research in human interaction and behavior. By incorporating this research, Tickle has pioneered a proprietary people ranking algorithm, called P2, to sort and rank people results by relevance to the person doing the search. P2 evaluates factors such as relationship proximity, background and interests to produce personalized people search results that are meaningful and useful to the individual searcher. Tickle People Search also incorporates web results from Ask Jeeves’ search engine, Teoma, and Ask Jeeves’ sponsored links.
“Tickle has always believed that the Internet is fundamentally about people, not just data,” added Currier. “Over the last five years, we have built our science and expertise in optimizing the structure and content of a person’s profile as well as in developing algorithms that allows us to rank and match individuals in terms of relevance to each other.”
Anyone can start using Tickle People Search today at http://search.tickle.com . If someone doing a search is not a Tickle member or not logged into Tickle’s social network, he or she will only receive people results of individuals who have included the search word within a completely public area of their profile.
