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Feb. 13, 2007 at 6:10am Eastern by Phil Bradley
Sproose - A Social Search Engine
Sproose is another social search engine where you get to vote for your favourite websites/pages, and to that extent it's very similar to previous social search engines that I've looked at recently. It's got the double 'o' in the name which always helps, and uses terminology that sounds familiar, such as 'Knowledge Rank technology'. However, to entirely dismiss it quickly would be something of an injustice, since a lot of work has gone into it.
It's a reasonable search engine, returning over 325 million results for 'internet' and results are displayed in a fully recognisable style, though they have a few extra icons at the bottom of each, allowing registered users to add tags, create discussions around specific pages, and registered users can create their own bookmarks as well. Finally, users of the search engine can vote for favourite sites and remove others from their results.
The advanced search options were not strong though, limited to 'all', 'phrase', 'exclude' and 'domain', and I wasn't too keen on their use of in context advertising which underlined particular words on the page; I found it intrusive and irritating. However, it makes a change to adverts down the right hand side of the screen I suppose.
Sproose isn't limited to webpages, since it provides search options for Current News, Video, Popular Tags (that is to say, if a user tags a page it shows up when you click on the appropriate term in the tag cloud), and finally options for 'My Sproose'. The latter includes a message centre, bookmarks, blog, profile and vote history, allowing users to keep in contact with friends and colleagues. It's a nice idea for sure, but I couldn't immediately see any way of seeing other users, and since the help options were poor I was left a little bit lost at this point.
Overall, Sproose is well laid out, there's thought behind it and it's certainly deserving of the 'social search engine' tag.
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By Phil Bradley
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