I ran into a kindred spirit at the SES conference in San Jose this summer – John Anderson. Smart, incredibly likable, motivated, and passionate about making the web a better place, I felt like I had known John for years after spending 10 minutes with him outside a session (this is one of my favorite parts of going to conferences). Over the past few months, John and a talented team of friends have been working on a meta-search engine with the impossibly cool address – URL.com. Let me walk you through it:
URL’s home page has a search box, but it also shows off members who’ve contributed to the results and the latest input. The idea here is to let users contribute comments and ratings to search results – something that engines have tried in the past (Google does this privately with their search quality review team), but URL is pretty slick.
I run a search for geoengineering – a topic I read about in Rolling Stone on my flight down to San Jose:
URL uses a standard metasearch system for ranking results; note that the first result is #7 at Google, #1 at Yahoo! and #6 at MSN.
This is the first result I got – pretty disappointing. But, note how I can leave a comment in the frame bar at the top and give a thumbs up or thumbs down. I give this a well-deserved thumbs down and return to the results to click on #2:
This second result is far more valuable – an in-depth article on the subject with some interesting examples. I’m giving it a thumbs up and some positive comments.
Now when someone runs a search at URL.com, they get new rankings, ordered by the comments and criticism I’ve given out for the results.
Is this in danger of being spammed? Yep… If it gets popular, I guarantee high levels of spam. But, I have to say that as a concept, it’s terrific and the implementation is pretty intuitive. Assuming the spam and manipulation could be controlled, I can imagine myself really liking this type of search engine – it’s almost a mix between StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Google.
Kudos to John and his team – this is no easy road to travel, but they’re innovating, executing, and experimenting, and the search industry could use more of that.
