Mashable has a post regarding a new social search engine called 50 Matches.  It only crawls sites that have been bookmarked or voted for on sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, etc, and only returns 50 results per query.

On their about page they state “For some time, people feel that Google search results are not good as sites fight to appear in its first results. Google seems to be broken and its time for search to evolve again.”  Well, you have to agree with part of what they’re saying.  Yes, it is time for search to evole and yes, Google has some of the knobs turned too far to the right.

It’s an interesting concept, but it appears to need some fine tuning.   One thing I noticed was across all searches was that the results were almost 100% articles.  No home pages, no category index pages, etc., which you typically find on higher level, generic queries.

I don’t know if I completely trust the social bookmarking sites to fulfill my queries, especially queries that exist outside of news, how-to articles, top 10 lists, etc.  As some of my sample queries suggest, they either need to implement some sort of query intelligence to serve different results for non-article based queries, or they will only cater to a specific niche.

Also, as Mashable.com suggests, their index doesn’t appear to be very large.  I did a couple searches on domains that I know have multiple links from the social bookmarking sites they crawl and it only had a few listings.  It doesn’t even bring back 50 listings for authoritative sites like CNN.com.

Like I said though, it’s a cool concept.  I think it would have potential if implemented with other features and logic.