More often than not, a Google search will return millions and millions of results. 50 Matches is a search engine that never returns more than 50. The idea is that by indexing and searching only sites that have been bookmarked, “dugg”, etc., the quality of the results will be so high that 50 matches are all you need.

There are many ways to use the powers of the social web for search. You can encourage voting and commenting like Scour does, improving the index of Yahoo by voting like Sproose does or index the bookmarks of your users like Nsyght does.

50 Matches combines human indexing with machine indexing by crawling only sites that were bookmarked, “dugg” or “reddit’ed”.

The people that use Digg, Reddit, Delicious etc. act as smart agents and generate big databases of the most liked sites on the web. No company could compete with the man hours people put in saving and tagging their bookmarks and by indexing only sites that have previously been saved and tagged, 50 Matches has a relatively spam free index.

Is it any good?

The concept is a good one, but the search results are decent but not excellent.

For instance, the results for “search engine news” does not include Search Engine Land (or Pandia…). The reason for this might be that 50 Matches hasn’t indexed enough bookmarks or have chosen the wrong bookmarking services to index (they do not provide information about which sites they index). Or it might be that they need to adjust their algorithm.

I would also love to see 50 Matches utilize more of the information available from the indexed sites. it could be useful for searchers to see how the web sites in the search results have been tagged or how many people have bookmarked them.

And there are absolutely no ways for visitors to 50 Matches to contribute (for instance by ranking listings or commenting on results). Visitors to a social powered search engine will have a more than an averagely high interest in contributing and could add value to the site. Nsyght does this better.

50 Matches has a good concept but they’ve got some work to do.