JetEye: A New Way to Search and Share

I've been remiss in not writing about JetEye, a new community-based search site based around the intriguing idea of "JetPaks."

A JetPak is a little bundle of content on a particular topic, which can include links to sites and images from around the Web, plus your own comments. You can build JetPaks quickly by pointing and clicking, share them with other JetEye users, and view the JetPaks that other folks have created (unless they've made them private). If someone else has chosen to make a JetPak editable, you can even add stuff to it in wiki-like fashion.

JetPaks feel vaguely like blog items, but instead of appearing all in one place in a reverse-chronological list, they live within JetEye's search interface and show up in the site's search results. Create and tag a JetPak about Tokyo, for instance, and other JetEye users will see it when they search for relevant keywords.

JetEye doesn't offer its own search engine; instead, it lets you query Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, Lycos, and Wisenut, with a clever interface that, when you click on a link in the search results, shows the page in question right in the results, so you don't need to toggle back and forth. If you like what you see, you can click any item in the search results to add it to a JetPak. (For some reason, though, JetEye only shows a maximum of four pages of results from any given engine.)

This service is labeled as a beta, and at the moment, it feels like a very rough first draft of an interesting idea. I'm puzzled, for instance, why the default view doesn't let you see your JetPak as you build it. (There's a preview mode, but you have to turn it on.) Also confusing: JetPaks have links which invite you to add content to other folks' JetPaks...even if you aren't, in fact, allowed to do so for a given JetPak.

And there's lot of missing functionality which JetEye would definitely benefit from, such as more control over the elements in a JetPak. (Right now, for instance, you can order them by type or chronologically, but can't rearrange them at will.)

Ultimately, the proof of the JetEye pudding will be in the JetPaks that its users create--both their quality and their quantity. In theory, there will eventually be so many of them that when you do a search within JetEye, you might get an array of useful JetPaks created by other users, all of them relevant to your query and all of them including hand-picked content of interest.

Like I say, that's still a theoretical scenario--I haven't run across any truly impressive JetPaks yet. But the site is young, and I'll be checking back to see how it evolves.

I'll also be keeping tabs on community-oriented search in general--since it's most definitely an emerging category. Other obvious examples right now--each of them strikingly different in approach--include Del.icio.us, Yahoo 360, and Digg.

If you try JetEye--or are a fan of any of these other sites--let us know what you think.