Social discovery engine Searchles announced enhanced video search functionality and a creative Ajax-based search button surfacing social refinement options. The Searchles platform includes many of the basic “social search” features such as tagging, sharing, comments, voting and social ranking, groups, messaging and clearly considers video content as just another media users can submit, tag, share submit. Thinking about it, Searchles is not unlike Digg, maybe just more personal and not yet as popular. Searchles positions itself as a a highly scaleable “social search” platform that showcases expertise, enables collaboration with peers and instantly captures it in searchable knowledge indexes. The platform is a hybrid, combining aspects of “social bookmarking” and “social networking” technology with analytical “social search” capability.

* New search box […] designed to be more compatible with the enhanced search options of a social search[…]. This innovative new feature combines the user-friendly display of a traditional search box with the range of network oriented social search options on Searchles – such as searching through your friends’ or groups’ posts – made visible as one scrolls over the search button.

* Many video sites only offer users the capability to search within said site, while Searchles enables users to do only one search to access a pool of videos that spans all of your favorite video sites as well as Searchles TV Channels users have created.

Reaching critical mass to fuel the social network effect is probably one of the top social search challenges along with combating Spam. The more users, the more interactions value top surface and the more content submitted.

Searchles gets somewhat lost in the sea of PR noise generated by FaceBook and others, while still managing to sustain the interest of some in the blogophere with a couple posts a day in average as reported by Nielsen’s BlogPulse and IceRocket.