Search is discovery. Our goal is to provide IT discovery and much more – IT intelligence and understanding. We are delivering this through the power of community and forum, and have termed it “social solving;” together all of us know more than any one of us knows alone.

We’ve built the world’s first search engine for IT because we believe that Search is the key to keeping up with the challenges that hit you every day. And we didn’t stop there. We connect people to their data, but we also connect people to one another. Because where do you turn for help when you’re scratching your head? Often to Internet searches, or friends in the field. We connect you with other IT experts around the world who have solved the same problems that you need to solve (or will need to solve).

We do this by allowing all users to save their search queries and publish them for anyone’s use. The elegance here is that you can immediately access any query that’s been saved and made public, and run it against your own data. (Only the query syntax is published. The data itself, of course, is private to each user.) This is especially helpful when you need a query that searches out a complex relationship – such as between users and the applications they have installed on their desktops – and you do not know where to start. The permutations are endless, but since the core concept is the same, any saved query can be used against any set of network data.

We built “community” directly into our search platform so you can use it to better understand your data and more quickly resolve complex problems. “Social solving” harnesses everything that is good about network collaboration, and in this case you do not need to actually know anyone else in the network to take advantage of it. You may be a one person IT shop, but you gain the knowledge and experience of a much, much larger and diverse group. It might sound a little like James Surowiecki’s ideas in The Wisdom of Crowds; groups of people collectively making decisions and solving problems such as how many jellybeans in a jar, the odds on a race, or the price of a stock.

We find Surowiecki’s ideas intriguing, but our idea of “social solving” has several significant differences. For example, instead of averaging individual guesses to reach a single solution, we provide a place to aggregate and present all the guesses, so that the deciding factor of the various opinions becomes the actual use of each. Also, there isn’t one answer per question. In our search platform, an infinite number of anonymous users solve an infinite number of problems simultaneously. We can even apply use-based algorithms to rank which queries are most likely to yield the best results, but the bottom line is: the community-saved searches are informed suggestions. Each user ultimately decides which queries to use.

Another important part of the built-in community is the benevolence of users who contribute saved searches to benefit others. It’s true that delivering massive value to users via “social solving” takes a meaningful number of users saving a meaningful number of useful searches – a critical mass.

We think the idea of “social solving” is a very simple, very elegant, and very potent proposition. Its time has come.