Read/WriteWeb got exclusive shots of the, as yet, unreleased Collarity Personalized Search Engine and I'm liking what I see (in the article).

Ok, what do I like about Collarity?  Collarity personalizes itself based around your preferences and the sites you visit that are Collarity's partners (which might raise a red flag, privacy issues, to some people).  That's a big plus as one of the main reasons Google became so successful, initially, was the ease of use and simplicity of it's interface.

A search interface that "reads your mind" and personalizes itself could reshuffle the deck of Search - not right away, but in time (and if Google did not buy up Collarity first).

But the other side of it – if a search engine like Collarity ever did get to be popular enough to contend with Google directly, it would mark the death of Search Engine Optimization as we know it (which would not be a bad thing – in my opinion – because I'm sick of the hype that's been built around SEO and now SEM). 

Here's some quotes from the Read/WriteWeb post of Collarity:

"…. Collarity has a unique position – which we will call Behavioral Personalized Search. Collarity tracks your behaviors via javascript snippets placed in partner sites, to extract your personal tastes and your communities automatically. Other services (Wink, Swicki et al) require you to define your search engine manually, by entering your favorite keywords and web sites or by voting. 

To summarize the other approaches to personalized search:

Vote Driven Personalized Search	You vote or bookmark if you like a site	Del.icio.us, Wink
Manual Entry Personalized Search	You enter the keywords and/org sites that you and your community might be interested in	Rollyo, Swicki

So Collarity works on the 'collective intelligence' principle. All your search history is saved, so that they can find your internet usage attitudes and like-minded people (aka your communities). But also via Javascript, they track your behaviours on partner sites. The sites that Collarity has made deals with are currently confidential. While I can't disclose them, I recommend you the look at the sources of the sites you frequently visit, as you may find Collarity bits in the HTML. [Editor's Note: before you go looking, I can confirm that R/WW isn't one of the test sites!]"

Part of Collarity is the site search part – which it the main part – it was pointed out that Collarity is not really replacing Google yet.

Read/WriteWeb seems to think that whatever Collarity is going to do – it should do soon – maybe go into beta mode and do a limited launch which will allow us all to take a closer look.  I'm all for that – although you have to be careful not to launch a product that's not ready yet, something like that totally destroys it's creadability.