Search technology provider Collarity launched today with a "multidimensional" search tool that combines a number of recent search innovations.

The product, "Collarity Compass" combines personal search, social search and standard search into a user-controlled interface, and serves it through a user-initiated overlay. The way users interface with the search is reminiscent of the Answers.com search tool deployed at CBSNews.com and a similar tool at the Wall Street Journal's website.

What's unique about Collarity's offering is the convergence of social, personal and standard search. The personal aspect is based on user behavior, the social automatically combines users by interest clusters.  At the interface level, users can adjust their search results by moving a slider along a spectrum spanning from personal to social, to global.

Other recent product developments in the search space include Google's customizable offering and Yahoo!'s long awaited search management platform, Panama.