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Unlike Mahalo, Search Wikia and other so-called social search engines, Delver has truly the potential of delivering results ranked according to their social relevance to the user.

Delver is social because it allows users to retain information found through search by simply clicking on a “keep it” button in the immediate vicinity of the result of a given search query. They can also add other users as “search buddies” creating a network of people with common search interests. As the profile widget looks now, in the future messaging between Delver users will be possible as well, converting the “social search engine” into a networking and communication platform.

The engine scans content from MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube, Hi5, FriendFeed and del.icio.us, mixes it well and delivers a mish-mash of more or less relevant links, photos and media. Irrelevant? Yes. For example, the term “web 2.0” delivers results about spider webs, webbing and other links that have nothing to do with “web 2.0”

But let’s not rush in with the negative criticism: the engine is now in public Alpha, meaning that it is counting on its users to refine the algorithms, to add new services (Facebook, popular blogging platforms, etc) and to expand its reach.

The engine is relatively new on the Web – it’s been around, in private alpha, for a few months already, enough to attract Google’s attention. There are no official statements from Google concerning a possible acquisition or merger, but when Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management states that “social is the new black” – we can easily conclude that Google has their eyes on startups like Delver, if they are not creating their own.

There was recently a lot of buzz around “semantic search engines” – which apparently will be the “new black” – not according to Google’s experts, though, who consider “social” the new black and “social” a feature, not a destination.

Joe Kraus is firmly convinced that the users expect all sites to be social. This will eventually lead to an evolution from “social sites” to a “social web.” I suppose we didn’t need Google’s “visionary thinking” to know that that’s the future direction of the Web, but it’s good to know that Google doesn’t sleep when its competitors “evolve.”

Obviously, data portability plays a crucial role in the evolution of the “social web” and there are already a few services that enable the users carry around their “profiles” – ex JS-kit’s Portable Visitor Profile. Most of these services are known as “widgets.” These “widgets” add content to otherwise static websites.

According to Google’s Joe Kraus, there are three main key helpers to the creation of the social web: OpenID for identity, OAuth for API, and Google’s Open Social for building cross-site apps.

In the short term the “social web” makes more sense than the “semantic web;” Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the future, but of course the evolution of the web technology as we know it points clearly into the direction of a “semantic web” with integrated social features.

Although still valuable the search engines of today (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) are old school. In the absence of the “social” feature, even the “semantic engines” like hakia and Powerset (they both have a type of “social functionality”, however unrefined) will still fail to deliver the best results.