Explaining Peer

So why did we decide to build Peer?

We were struck by how much work we do when we filter through search results from the web, looking for the pages that will satisfy our information need.

If you think about your close network - we're talking the team you work in, or your close friends, you're very likely to share considerable interests with them - because your team all works in property in London, or clean tech in LA. Or, broadly, you enjoy similar activities socially- cycling, or going to Italian restaurants.

So, armed with some previous projects we'd worked on which explored this idea, we set out to build a way to let people share the sites that they find on the web, with the minimum possible effort, and to make these searchable by people in their network.

We feel like we've got to the stage where Peer is making a real contribution to the way that we search the web on a daily basis. We're releasing it into the wild to get feedback from others on how it works for them. We're not pitching ourselves as a Google killer, because what we're doing is quite different. We're trying to get the best possible results for a narrower set of searches - the ones that your network will know about. So if I do a search about the best places to fish in Sydney, then a web search engine will most likely give me a better result. (I live in London and don't know anyone who fishes). However, searching for information about OpenCoffee (an entrepreneurs weekly meet in London) brings up some more interesting information, including the blog post that kicked off the OpenCoffee movement as the top result.

We think that with some more hard work, the range of queries that we return great socially aware results for will increase, as will the accuracy - we're not there yet by any means. But we really need your help - please let us know where you find Peer to be useful, how many people you reckon is the optimal size of your groups, and other features that you think would be useful. We've already incorporated Twitter and Delicious links from your network, and plan to add Yammer very soon, but please continue to let us know what you think!