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Mar. 21, 2007 at 8:18am Eastern by Greg Sterling
PreFound Relaunches, Tries To Rise Above Social Search Din
The term "social search" is kind of a catch-all category now for a range of companies that are bringing people back into the algorithm. Not only are these companies seeking to improve search results with humans, they're trying to differentiate vs. Google from a marketing standpoint on that basis as well. Eurekster, ChaCha, Jimmy Wales' Wikia Search and PreFound are just four among many examples. These companies are all doing interesting things but there's a kind of "noise" now that creates a marketing challenge for anyone competing in the space.
Trying to rise above that din, PreFound relaunched yesterday with a new UI, new and improved personalization tools and a new push to gain attention in the market.
Rebranding itself somewhat as a "community" search engine, PreFound, like others, is trying to build a human-edited layer on top of general (in this case Google) search results.
In the new UI, results are layered with Wikipedia, if applicable, at the top, followed by the human-powered results (rated collections of links) and then Google Web results. Here's an example search for "social bookmarking sites." Here's an example of one of the collections of links in the results for social bookmarking sites.
Social engines are seeking to bring people back into search, in one sense, to create more structure around results. And in many cases, assuming enough participation, engines such as PreFound are indeed going to be more efficient than using "traditional" Web search. But participation is the core challenge.
PreFound CEO Steve Mansfield and I discussed the central "chicken and egg" problem here, which is ultimately a marketing challenge. You have to get attention to gain participation to create the human-powered index that is your differentiator and helps build more usage and momentum in turn. It's a worthy but enormously difficult project.
There will be many casualties on the way to social search success. But it does seem that there's an emerging appetite for viable alternatives to traditional Web search.
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By Greg Sterling
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See Related Stories In: Search Engines: Search Wikia, Search Engines: Social Search Engines, Search Engines: Wikipedia
Greg,
I would add Bessed to your list of search sites trying to add the human element to create better results.
One of the challenges of human-powered search is that opening up search results to be finagled by the masses opens the spam door even wider than the robot-based engines do.
We at Bessed are encouraging visitor participation via commenting on results and suggesting new sites in the comments section, but we just can't see opening it up to the extent that everyone can get their sites added immediately with no screening process. It's more work for us and a slower process, but I can't see how the wiki type model is going to be useful due to the spam issue.