Nsyght is a fledgling human powered search engine, still in deployment mode, with the motto “Kick the algorithm to the curb”.

Of course, every search engine needs an algorithm to find relevant web pages and rank the search results. So what are they up to at Nsyght?

I asked Geoffrey McCaleb, Lead Architect/Founder of Nsyght, and got an interesting peek into the process of creating a new Web 2.0 service.

Intro to Nsyght, a human powered search engine
Anyone’s free to search Nsyght and benefit from the collected web experience of the Nsyght community. But the fun starts when you sight up for an account.

The first thing you do is import your bookmarks (from your browser or from a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia). This way, you get your very own brand of search results. Nsyght will go to your bookmarking service on a regular basis to fetch your new bookmarks.

The next step is to browse the community to find users with interests similar to your own. When you make them your friends, their bookmarks also influence your search results.

Pandia: I took Nsyght for a test drive and it seems that when I do a search, the results are ranked by how many Nsyght users have bookmarked a page. So the bookmarks of the users is the primary index. Am I right? And how do you rank these results?

Geoffrey McCaleb: You are correct. Basically our algorithm is driven by bookmarks. We are trying to strike a fine balance between emphasizing sites you trust vs. sites that the community at large finds relevant. So yes, our index is made up of both bookmarks, and other pages from those sites.

Pandia: Where do you go for results on topics where the community of Nsyght users don’t have any bookmarks?

Geoffrey McCaleb: We don’t use results from Google or Yahoo as we have our own search index. By owning our own data, we are free to mix and mash it in any way we please with no restrictions. We try and emphasize bookmarked URL’s first, but failing that we fall back on generic pages.

Pandia: When I do a search, I see a sidebar called Friendspotting sidebar? Does it display the latest or the most popular bookmarks of my friends?

Geoffrey McCaleb: The first one is correct. Friendspotting is a list of the most recent bookmarks from your friends. That way, once you log in you can quickly see what your friends are up to.

Pandia: On my profile page, there’s an option to import friends from twittr, last.fm etc. Do you use the imported profiles and friends from these services in finding and ranking search results or are they simply a way for users to see each other in a richer context?

Geoffrey McCaleb: The main goal was to provide a way to ease social network fatigue. In other words, when you join a new service why do you have to go through all the pain of defining your social graph again? With our integration you don’t have to go through the process of re-friending people you already know. Once they get more feature rich, you’ll be able to virally invite those friends (at the moment, we just support this feature via Pownce) and a lot more, irrespective if your friend is on Pownce or Last.fm.

We want to give users the tools to them to move and communicate from one network to another more easily, and allow them to bring their friends with them without going to the extreme of forcing users to spam for our benefit.

Pandia: Do you plan to integrate with other bookmarking services and other networking sites? Are there other new features in the pipeline?

Geoffrey McCaleb: I can’t really comment on Alpha 2, which is coming soon. Generically speaking, as we support OAuth, we will integrate with any service we can if it makes sense and helps our users.

[OAuth is an open protocol for authentication between online services. The Editor].

Hungry for more?
If you like the idea of following the development of a new search engine, I recommend that you sign up for an Nsyght account. The search engine is fully operational even though it is in deployment mode. If you find it isn’t working like you hoped it would, you are invited to contribute feature requests for the next release.