To all of you that are new to PreFound.com, welcome. Today is our official launch day, even though we’ve been in the testing process for a matter of months at this point. If you are new, you might benefit from reading the press release that came out today about PreFound.com here and the article that will be published in DesignTechnica this week that talks about us.

Never Search Alone. That’s our philosophy here at PreFound.com. Here, we allow you to search what people like you have already found… “pre-found”, get it? And, we need you to help us. We’re the Search Engine, You’re the Fuel. We really mean that. We’re the new guys on the block and we need to grow our community, which will grow our content base, which will make our site more useful to everyone. We know you’re better at finding information compared to some algorithm. Help us make PreFound.com a great place to find information. Find out how.

Unless you’re searching for something truly obscure, you can bet other people have already searched for and found the information that you’re looking for. With PreFound.com, you can leverage the work already done by others and build on that base rather than repeat it. Why re-invent the wheel? PreFound.com is designed to cut through the confusion that a typical Google or Yahoo search might return by adding the human element. We’re convinced that communities of knowledgeable, interested people can identify relevant sites much better than a traditional search engine. Also, PreFound.com’s results are in the form of Find Groups, which are folders that have been organized by us or our users that contain the links and information you’re looking for, not just links like on traditional search engines. Those Find Groups can contain multimedia links together with traditional text links, which is a great feature.

One problem that has plagued some of the other “tagging” oriented sites is that their interface takes a little getting used too. Not here at PreFound.com. PreFound.com works like a regular search engine and utilizes a search interface that’s familiar and easy for people to use, easily distinguishing it many of the tagging sites out there. PreFound.com’s effort is to be more than a tagging site and redefine web-search, moving away from the algorithmic methods defined by Google and others. With Yahoo claiming to index 20 billion items and Google claiming to be 3 times larger than that, the web is becoming far too big and traditional methods of finding things on the web have to change, and human information gathering is a big part of the answer.

PreFound.com offers the PFfinder, a patented technology for easily and quickly finding and tagging sites of interest, then organizing them into usable Find Groups, to keep for yourself or share with others in the PreFound.com community. It’s the next evolutionary step in tagging technology, providing enhanced methods of navigating web pages, advanced tagging, organizing and archiving of all types of links, as well as virtually instantaneous sharing of groups of links.

During our Beta Testing process, we’ve been discussing some interesting issues related to tagging and community search. We’ve kept some of the more relevant entries available on this blog. Please take a look if you can.