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Evolving paradigms
SEVANTI NINAN
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Are social search engines the next big thing?
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Photo:Vipin Chandran
Raising the bar: The search for a more relevant search engine is on.
“The real question here is, can a small band of guys uproot a big gorilla? The answer is yes. It’s already been done. Yahoo used to be king and now Google is. Relevancy won in the end of that race and we can be even more relevant using human intelligence and collaboration. Our goal is to have 99.9 relevancy within the first three search results.” That’s from Neal Verma, one of the Houston-based founders of a new search engine called iRazoo, talking to startuphouston.com about their latest venture, billed as world’s first people powered, points driven, search engine.
The great thing about the Internet is that it is constantly evolving. Even as social networking (Facebook, Orkut) has become a major fad, there is a relatively new trend on the block. It is called social search. If you want a single line definition, it’s a trend that is introducing a human element into Internet searches. If search engines are technology’s gift to knowledge seeking and sifting, using spiders and bots which retrieve information in a split second, they are now turning populist, literally, using people to rate sites and thereby influence their ranking. Verma calls it the second revolution of search. “We’re taking computer-driven algorithmic results and mixing that in with human intelligence.”
Human input
iRazoo, for instance, gives both standard searches ranked by keyword relevance, as well as sponsored links. The difference is that here the top-ranked searches will be based on user recommendations. Users recommend sites based on felt relevance. Why would they bother to do that? Because you offer them incentives. People who register for iRazoo and make recommendations or refer others to the site can earn points that can be redeemed for prizes.
Social search has been catching on for some time now. There is sproose.com which offers user improved results. It claims to be the “search engine of the people, by the people and NOT corporations.” You can sign up to be a voter on Sproose, and vote for web pages according to what you think of them. It has a graphic on its home page to show you how different the rankings can be when there is a human component in the search result.
Other social search engines are Mahalo and Bessed. Every Mahalo search result has a form to recommend a link for the page and a message board where you can discuss the page. And it has set up what it calls the Mahalo Greenhouse, which invites you to join, write search engine result pages which Mahalo will review, and if they like what you have done, you get paid. As for Bessed, here’s the spiel from them: “What is new is we’ve built it on a blogging platform, allowing you to not only find what you want, but also to comment on what you see, whether it’s to suggest a site be removed, or to discuss different topics that interest you.” On Bessed you can search listed categories: real estate, baby names, best beaches, Greece Travel, etc. Google is a category too. Here you can search the 21 best sites about Google!
A major reason for the social search trend is because others are using people to influence searches. Check out smorty.com, whose stated purpose is to connect advertisers with high quality blogs, which will then “Boost your search engine rankings with quality inbound links from thousands of blogs” and thereby increase the commercial website’s traffic. It proclaims, “Blog advertising made easy. Proven results.”
Getting paid for your views
Both for defeating commercialisation of links and for promoting it, people get paid. On Smorty the advertiser looks at blogger reviews for his/her website, and if it likes them, pays for the review! It’s a wonder Samir Jain hasn’t expanded Indiatimes to include this idea of transparent paid product search as yet. When you are doing this you don’t just pick up any old blogger. Smorty rates them according to their blog’s Google page rank, their Alexa rankings, as well as how fast they return reviews assigned to them. “If you have a higher Smorty score, you are more likely to receive more campaign offers and more higher priced campaigns.” Note that they say upfront that this kind of website reviewing is essentially a new style advertisement campaign.
The debate over search engine ethics on the Internet is an old one, this column last wrote about it in 2001. Then it was simply a matter of people being willing to pay to climb up the search results. So the practice of paid placements, and paid inclusions began. This has evolved into paid reviews with the explosion in blogs coming very handy.
Yet another way to use blogs in searches but without the commercial angle has been devised on a site called Eurekster, which has come up with the idea of users creating “swickis” or custom social search portals for blogs to link to.
So is any of this going to woo anybody away from the omniscient Google? Unlikely, because Google never becomes complacent. Not only is it constantly refining its search technology, including using human input, it makes sure the world knows it. It invited a New York Times reporter recently to spend a day with its engineers and describe how they labour over perfecting their searches. Highly effective PR, if you read the piece.
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