In January, I interviewed Geoffrey McCaleb, Lead Architect/Founder of Nsyght, to get a look at the process of creating a new search engine. Nsyght is a human powered search engine and this week Geoffrey and his team launched Nsyght Beta.

What is unique about Nsyght?

Once you have signed up for an account, you are encouraged to import your bookmarks (from your browser or from a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or ma.gnolia).

Nsyght’s algorithm is driven by bookmarks. The goal is to strike a fine balance between emphasizing sites the users trust vs. sites that the community at large finds relevant. The index is made up of both bookmarks, and other pages from those sites.

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. Nsyght will go to your bookmarking service on a regular basis to fetch your new bookmarks. This way, you get your very own brand of search results.

What’s new?

Advanced Search is available by clicking a link below the search box. It provides you with a couple of features that are easy to use yet quite powerful: You can filter your search by tags (more on this below) and you can limit your search to your own bookmarks or those of your friends.

Tag support. If you save bookmarks directly to Nsyght, you can now apply tags. If you import bookmarks to Nsyght, the tags you have applied to them in e.g. del.icio.us are imported along with the bookmarks.

Tags now show up everywhere on Nsyght: Each bookmark is followed by the tags you applied to it.

Click a tag and you get a list of other bookmarks in the Nsyght index tagged with the same keyword. In the advanced search options, you can filter your search by tags. In the search results, you’ll find a cloud of tags related to the search you performed.

Better networking. A feature called “user clouds” makes it easy to find friends with similar interests. When you click a tag, users who frequently apply that tag to their bookmarks will appear in the right column. Similarly, if you do a search, the users with the most relevant bookmarks will appear.

Nsyght comes of age

There are countless of initiatives out there who try to harness the wisdom of crowds to improve web search. Veteran Dmoz used to be great, but the results are deteriorating with the decreasing number of volunteer editors.

Cha-Cha has secured venture capital and has some enthusiastic users, but the quality of the results provided by their human guides is often dubious.

With Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia style Wikia Search it’s too early to tell.

Tag support has improved Nsyght a lot. A bookmark without the tags only tells you someone wants to return to a certain site. With the tags, each bookmark gets a valuable context and when you add all the tags of all the users, you get a web of information that is truly valuable.

The Nsyght team only just released their Beta, but they already have a user friendly product that produce good results in many cases.

Right now, the bulk of the users are web developers and other geeks, but as the user base grows, Nsyght will produce quality results in on a broader range of searches.

What do I miss?

One thing is obvious: At the moment, Nsyght imports bookmarks from Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia and Simpy. That is not enough. I miss Furl, Netvous, Faves, Blogmarks and other popular services. The more bookmarking sevices are supported, the faster the user base will grow and that is of course what will make or brake Nsyght.