In-Brief: Peggy Albright performed some wonderful detective work over the weekend, uncovering Hooja, a new social search engine that is backed by the investors of PayPal, Facebook and Digg. Watch this space…

A small startup company that is working in stealth mode in Palo Alto, California, claims to be creating “a new way to capture and search for your information on the go.” It has also referred to its technology as “the first search agent for personal and social information.” This company deserves to be watched.

The company is called Hooja and, if for no other reason, it should draw interest in the industry because of one name associated with it: Peter Thiel. Thiel, who was the first investor in Facebook and a cofounder of PayPal, recently led a funding round in December 2007 for Hooja that raised $1.5 million in seed funding, including funding from an investor in the community and content sharing site, Digg. Hooja is led by its founder and CEO, Na’ama Moran, who was formerly an analyst at Greylock Partners. She founded Hooja in April 2006.

Hooja’s seed funding is not a huge sum, but the company is hiring, no doubt with the help of that support, and also preparing to launch a private beta test of the service. Participants can sign up now on the company’s site, though scheduling and details of the service and beta program are yet to be released.

MSG has contacted Moran for a briefing. In the meantime, from what I can gather based on Hooja’s job announcements for engineering talent, the service will run on a converged mobile and Web platform and use natural-language processing algorithms to improve search results.

The company claims to be innovating in the following areas: how results are ranked, how the user interacts with the system, and solving the scalability challenges that are issues in NLP systems. Hooja has just a handful of employees, but the team includes people who have worked for EA, Yahoo, and Oracle.

Peggy (Salz) adds: Is Hooja’s “coming out” a testament to the power of people search or a ploy to get in on the ground floor of a mega-trend? We’ll reserve judgment until after the briefing and demo. However, I must remark that social search and mobile are nonetheless a perfect match and expect more activity in this area as more companies understand that algorithmic search – alone – is a clear case of “close but no cigar.”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 10:25 am and is filed under Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.