Attendi is the first search engine that combines chat, social networking, and search. It allows you to search people and not the internet’s web pages.

Rather than searching and indexing Web content, Attendi lets “captures the life experience of users and makes it accessible to others.” Attendi is a combination of search, social networking, and live chat. It gathers content by using conversation rather than the way other traditional search engines gather information, which is by crawling the web. Attendi is trying to build a community of activists (that they call ‘Attendis’) whose job is to interact and contribute knowledge about a topic. Users can then search the data using the Attendi site.

To be an Attendi (topic expert), you join Attendia and create a profile. You then share you interests, hobbies, and other stuff that you like and are passionate about. What’s cool is that you can add your existing blogs, keywords, favorite sites, and your social networks to your profile which helps you define who you are and what you know.

Attendi says that the “best way to build up your profile is through conversation. Search results represent real people and their archived conversations, not Web pages.”

Once you are logged into Attendi, you can initiate a “live discussion” and get an instant answer to your questions–from others who know about the subject. All conversations that you have are indexed within Attendi and archived.

Attendi’s revenues come from sponsorships that allow dedicated ownership of topics. There’s also sponsored advertising links within the search results, and a “live ad unit”, advertising that is served only when a live brand representative is ready to field inquiries about a product or service through the real-time chat functionality.

Attendi was founded in March 2007, is privately funded, and founded by CEO Drew Rayman. Attendi is based in New York, New York.