Sproose: Human Powered Search Meets Digg
Duncan Riley
47 comments »
Asking how many ways you can make a search engine is like asking how many ways you can scramble an egg, there are a number of different ways and although it’s not rocket science you can still end up with something inedible.
People powered search is the trendiest of egg scrambling search engine recipes at the moment. Service such as ChaCha have contractual employees answering search queries in real time. The Jason Calacanis vehicle Mahalo launched in alpha this week with a Wikipedia meets Google model which aims to provide pre-written results for 10,000 search queries.
Danville, CA based Sproose marries human powered search to Digg.
Sproose is a personalized search engine that combines social networking with peer-moderated rankings giving users the ability to prioritize, customize and fine-tune searches to produce relevant web search results.
Sproose users can effectively categorize and index relevant sites and tailor those for personal or group use. Through collective moderation and scoring users can sort through existing sites to assemble only the most appropriate results.
The results aren’t bad. It isn’t clear where the search results are originally pulled from (I’d guess Google) and the social voting feature on link priority creates a different search experience. Video results come from Blinkx and Sproose indexes over 25,000 sources for news. Whether it will take is another matter; everyone wants to be the next Google and there is no shortage of competitors. I can honestly say though that I’ve seen many worse than Sproose.
Reminds me a bit of swicki http://swicki.eurekster.com/ only makes more sense. The swicki idea of making custom search hubs is fun but not very useful and the results are confusing.
I don’t think the search results for sproose are powered by google. I tried a few terms from google then sproose. Different results displayed. Some of the data outdated (title and description wise).
not working for me
now it is. Looks like it’s yahoo, not google. ho hum, another day another search mashup. So why do I vote again? popular terms will not be influenced at all by my little human vote and will be spammed like crazy–i could write a bot in 10 seconds to spam vote this for my site. But who cares? not enough traction to invest that 10 seconds. and there’s the rub. Damned if it does get traction (via spam). Damned if it doesn’t (via indifference). Next.
Nothing really wrong or really compelling about the results. I know this kind of idea has some potential, i just think they almost need years morw incubation before launching, or something to make them stand apart on results as opposed to the process.
“digg meets search!” makes for a great headline, but a much less interesting app.
yawn.
looks like something no one will use. no offense, but this has been tried many times in many guises and no one wants to “digg” search results. that’s why google is successful.
Ooh, what if they figured out a way to facebook plugin it?
yeah you are true on this google has everything also digg too why we need another thing to try to find something?
Finally, a new search thingy that I like. What do I like ?
- super clean, very aesthetic layout
- the voting on results I think is fantastic
- so is commenting on results
- it’s like digg whatever topic I want
Doubt I will use it though as I am so used to google.
“Digg meets Search” is great idea but will it get tractions? For Video, it is using Blinkx but there are better alternatives like AOL and VeZoom. What are other people experiences?
Seems completely second rate to aftervote ( http://www.aftervote.com )
I for one think human indexed search has a place, though it’s obviously nothing new. But Google already uses Digg like collaborative filtering (in addition to PageRank, keyword matching, etc) to refine its search results. In both paid and organic search, the links consumers actually click on for a given query are bumped up the list over links that don’t.
Conceptually, this is no different than the collaborative filtering of news stories or other pages. Arguably Google’s refinement based on searchers’ clicks is more comprehensive and less prone to selection bias that occurs based on which users bother to take the time to Digg something.
I don’t think anyone will be upstaging Google any time soon. The only reason Google was able to outmaneuver yahoo and MSN, was because they didn’t care about search, and search results were crap. With Google, it would be impossible to compete. a) people are happy with Google, they get relevant results and quickly, so there is really no reason for them to switch b) if you do come out with something uber innovative, you won’t be under the radar for long. And then Google will either buy you out(which I’m sure is the goal for most of these start ups), or destroy you by utilizing what you came up with into Google itself.
I think we need to wait a few years before trying to upstage Google. Let them make a few more mistakes, let the Google halo fade(right now they can’t do anything wrong, let them become the evil corporate giant), let people who SEO/backlink their websites, ruin the search results…THEN when people are tired of getting crappy results you might have some chance, but for now? If you come out with god’s gift to earth for search, I probably still wouldn’t switch, because chances are Google has similar search results in the 90th percentile
you had to make a sensational headline just to draw some attention from diggers huh!
I was playing with it a little bit for the last 20 minutes, and it looks like it would be very easy to spam… so I wonder how do they effectively filter spammers out…
“Technology… the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it. “
What. The. Frack…..that’s all I can say. I think the these guys actually have hit the nail on the head better than TC for the Sproose Goose and Mahalo:
http://www.uncov.com/2007/6/1/.....gra-cialis
http://www.uncov.com/2007/5/31.....or-useless
Just wondering if this is the future .. search sites using other search sites… I understand soa and such, but is there going to be any start-ups which spider the web using a new algorithm? or is it going to be use msn, yahoo and google results, combine, spit out? just wondering if people have given up on algorithms and spidering and we’re just building on top of that?
People are gaming Digg - why for hits /
- / people would game this even more! /
The problem is…
When I search and find something I like, my brain has now switched to the new site, and I could care less about going BACK to the search engine to mark something as good. Its like going backward.
Sooo, probably the only folks that will do much voting are those who have a vested interest in the site.
Sigh, but I do like the idea and look.
lots of recipes for search engines and scrambled eggs but no matter which recipe one uses the results are pretty much the same and finding the best one has always been a matter of personal taste.
Why are we regressing in our technology and business models? I thought the whole point was to maximize the intelligence of automation and add to it an element of human experience. Not replace it altogether with stand-by clerks.
Web 3.0 has been termed a Semantic Web - a web whereby the technology becomes intelligent enough to understand the needs of the user. Right, that was called AI a few years - so the concept is not new, but the execution of it is.
We’ve established such a sophisticated means to allow people to collaborate on topics (projects, sites, opinions, etc.) with our various social media. And the internet has offered such a low cost (money/effort) means to obtain my end goal. Why would I want to support a “search result consultant” ??
I used ChaCha a few times, and the cost to me was:
1. Time. By the time I got my first result, Google, Yahoo and Ask had it for me in triplicate.
2. Relevancy. They continued to ask me questions about why and what and how. Again, this is being coded - whether it be upfront questioning or categorizing results in chunks.
3. Dealing with the ignorant. There’s a psychological sense of frustration that occurs when you’re dealing with someone who just doesn’t get it. It’s one thing if a computer fails, it’s another if your “peer” does.
Sproose is getting it a bit more than ChaCha and Mahalo. But just remember, we’re not all equal. The term “architecture” can mean different things to people, demographics etc.
The engine should learn who the user is, and potentially offer the user the ability to use the ratings of similar users. In this manner, the results might be more appropriately fine tuned.
My $02.
Dk
I can’t help myself…
Should be called the “sproose goose” after the Howard Hughes plain.
Brilliant idea, but won’t fly.
Also, in response to some comments above. I think all the new search engines probably no that they will not get that much traction in the face of google. But ! They are all hoping to be acquired by someone to help them compete with google (like yahoo, amazon, etc)…
strange search. I prefer digg.
Is anyone else punching in for work at TC?
The only stories on TC are now from Duncan.
just some thoughts, spam cannot penetrate user voted sites, so the more votes the further down in the index spam goes. sproose has clearly thought about gaming the system, better to try that with seo on google.
Yawn, yawn. Write about something that is unique and useful!
Like the concept. Unfortunately, there to much noise and competition in that space. But, as one of the posts above mentioned looking to “Facebook”, would be an interesting area to explore.
That’s right I mentioned it- I’m Mark Klein, MD!
Wait until the spammers have their way with it
One more search engine based upon an exciting idea. But what if to forget about the ideas behind the product and just evaluate it fairly. The excitement is not so big now. People go to search system not to evaluate how sounds the idea but to succeed with search results.
Very interesting, exactly what I was looking for out of Mahalo.
The results are actually GOOD.
I’m trying to find out where / how they are getting them though?
The same search will NOT match goog/yahoo/msn results.. didn’t check ask.com however..
Sorry… Search didn’t find the correct results.
You have lot of VC money… But you can’t always win the innovation.
If you decide to write search engine. Never use PHP script. VCs wouldn’t buy php search engine mode.
always JSP, ASP, ASPx, Perl, CGI, and other scripts.
Hmm, not sure how much more efficient and accurate the results will be when each queries needs to be pre-made…
@Jessica,
Yes, I noticed the results are pretty good too. As far as I can tell they are using a combination of Google, Live, Ask, and maybe something else. Their FAQs don’t say how they get the results but each query takes time to process, and the results show excerpts as found on other engines..
Nice idea. I like Mahalo also, however I have the feeling that search engine as a business is getting inflationary. Can we all keep pace with every single search engine coming out? Also, why no one concentrates his efforts in translation. So far, I do believe that Google sucks abit. I made a brief comparison between Leo.org and Google, and to be fair to Google, their translation really let down
Check out http://www.allthat.com or http://www.allth.at — really cool SMART, persistent search application that actually will let you filter searches and aggregate based on what you need and keep searching for you on a daily basis.
why not use PHP?
PHP is the only way to go!
I do not understand “human powered search”. Whatever happen with automation, efficiencies and objective accuracy?
Sorry, I do not get the value of this.
it will be interesting when it scales to see if /how different the results are from the “alg” guys.
I am a humongous fan of social search (as I browse over to mahalo).
Their system for delivering relevant results is a credible alternative to Google’s algorithm. I will disagree with almost everyone else commenting here and predict that Sproose will be very, very big. Especially if they do cute stuff like let webmasters put “Sproose Search” boxes on their sites, like Google did when it went after Altavista et al… True, they will have to fight spam, just like Google, but that doesn’t mean their model isn’t valid.