Last week I stumbled across a really interesting and easy-to-use personalized search plugin – Kikin.
Kikin, plugin you download for your browser, was launched in late 2009 and is still in beta form. When you search on Google, Bing or Yahoo – in addition to your regular search results, it will also aggregate relevant content from: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Reader, iTunes, eBay and/or Amazon.
Although Google is beginning to aggregate social media into its search parameters – what is different about Kikin is that you see results from YOUR streams – which means you are getting richer, personal and more relevant search results.
Here’s a screen shot from a search I did with the word “news”:
Who wouldn’t prefer the recommendations of friends through Facebook or Twitter over results returned by a search engine?
There’s a few things I really like about Kikin:
- It’s compatible with Firefox, Safari and IE (Chrome coming soon)
- Quick download. It took just seconds to download it and I instantly start using it.
- Re-tweet function. Within the twitter stream you can instantly re-tweet something.
- Customize Twitter stream. You can opt to view just your Twitter stream or all tweets.
- Facebook news stream. Kikin connects with your news feed via Facebook Connect.
I also really like that you can easily moderate what content you want to see and which content isn’t useful to you.
You may not be interested in results from eBay for your searches, which you can disable (of course, it will still show up in your Google results). And if you tire of Kikin’s results, you can easily minimize the pane. It will interesting as Kikin moves out of it’s beta phase to see what kind of impact this may have on real estate home searches or agent searches.
For fun, I typed in ‘Realtor’ into Google using Kikin, and this Twitter post came up:
“If the realtor & her client next to us each stopped answering incoming cell calls they might get their biz mtg finished. Weird. Rude. Unpro.” :-)
I also typed in ‘Realtor Bay Area’ and from iTunes dozens of real estate podcasts came up! from ReMax and Prudential. Interesting!
The bottom line is this: search is becoming more and more personalized and relevant. Not only that, but Kikin makes perfect use of how so many of us interact on the web – we surf from one site to another looking for prices, reviews, etc.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this company evolves!
What do you think? Would love your feedback, please leave me a comment below!
Written by Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News
