This happened more than a year ago, according to the report. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to discuss the matter, telling those Microsoft executives that the company had too much else to focus on. Neither Google nor Facebook spokespeople would comment officially on the matter.

The report cements the suspicion that some within Microsoft, at least, are not convinced of Bing’s strategic importance to the company, though Ballmer has long said Microsoft is in the search game for the long haul. In Microsoft’s most recent earnings report, it said its online services division, which houses Bing and AdCenter, brought in revenue of $747 million, resulting in a loss of $479 million. Still, that was roughly $300 million better compared to the previous year, when it lost $776 million.

Meanwhile, Facebook’s most recent S-1 shows a slowing of its meteoric growth, causing speculation about what it needs to do — get into the search advertising business, perhaps? — to resume a growth trajectory that will satisfy investors.

Though Google definitely sees Facebook as a threat, with the launch of Google+ largely seen as a reaction to that threat, Microsoft has had a much cozier relationship with Facebook. Earlier this week, the companies announced a $550 million patents deal, in which Microsoft sold 650 patents to Facebook. Interestingly, those patents will help Facebook protect itself from a lawsuit filed by Yahoo, another Microsoft partner. (This was the original topic of the New York Times story, and The Business Insider called out the acknowledgement of Microsoft trying to sell Bing.)

Back in 2007, Microsoft made a $240 million investment in Facebook. At that time, there was much speculation about Microsoft acquiring Facebook.

Our original story here reported the winners/losers list, as Searchmetrics did, showing who was estimated to have gained and lost in the new Penguin Update that was released this week by Google. Penguin targets not low-quality content but outright spam.

No one knew that there had been a Panda Update that also happened, one that in fact was likely responsible for most of the changes on the lists. This was confirmed by the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts. He commented after the original story came out:

Hey Danny, there’s a pretty big flaw with this “winner/loser” data. Searchmetrics says that they’re comparing by looking at rankings from a week ago. We rolled out a Panda data refresh several days ago. Because of the one week window, the Searchmetrics data include not only drops because of the webspam algorithm update but also Panda-related drops. In fact, when our engineers looked at Searchmetrics’ list of 50 sites that dropped, we only saw 2-3 sites that were affected in any way by the webspam algorithm update. I wouldn’t take the Searchmetrics list as indicative of the sites that were affected by the webspam algorithm update.

Following up with Cutts on Twitter, he told me the Panda Update hit around April 19. The last update was Panda 3.4 on March 23, which Google had publicly shared.

The original Searchmetrics post has since been updated to show what it believes are now the Penguin Update winners and losers. The charts below reflect the original list, those who were estimated to have gained or lost from the Panda release.

The Winners

Among the winners are big brands and news sites. Spotify, The New York Observer, music site NME, Men’s Health, Poynter, The Verge, Stack Overflow and Marvel are just some of the easily recognizable names that jumped out at me.

Here’s the full list of who was judged to have gained visibility in an initial study of 50,000 keywords, for 5 million domains, to see who went up or down in the first 100 results compared to last week:

The Losers

Who was hit hardest? First the list:

Searchmetrics, going through the list, summarized the losers as mainly this way:

• Sites using databases to aggregate information
• Press portals and aggregators
• Heavily-templated web sites

Only Losers Really Know If They Lost

As a reminder, lists like this aren’t perfect. The sites above may have had gains and drops for other reasons; less visibility this week because last week they were visible for different news stories, for example. Also, Google had a problem with a parked domain classifier last week that might have hit some sites which later rose back up.

It’s also worth remembering that this is a sample of search terms. The only way to really know if any update has hurt or helped you is to look at your search-driven traffic from Google, rather than particular rankings or lists like this, which have become popular after Google updates. If you’ve seen a significant increase, you’ve probably been rewarded by it. A big decrease? Then you were probably hit.

Finally, it’s really worth keeping in mind this is a list of those Searchmetrics believes are hit by the Panda Update 3.5, not by the Penguin Update. Penguin was aimed at taking out spam sites.

Related Articles

• Infographic: The Google Panda Update, One Year Later
• Google Says Panda 3.4 Is ‘Rolling Out Now’
• Dropped In Rankings? Google’s Mistake Over Parked Domains Might Be To Blame
• Google Launches Update Targeting Webspam In Search Results
• Did Google’s Search Results Get Better Or Worse?

Search forums like Webmaster World and Google’s own search discussion areas have had much discussion about recent drops in ranking, such as here, here and as summarized by Search Engine Roundtable. Some have wondered if this was the release of what’s been dubbed an “over-optimization penalty” that Google previously said would be coming this year.

Whether that really will be a penalty of pages with too much SEO or more likely a tougher crackdown on actual spam remains to be seen. But in either case, that penalty isn’t what’s happened.

Rather, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, said the change is due to Google mistakenly classifying some sites as being parked domains, domains that generally lack any content other than ads.

Cutts posted on Google+

I saw a recent post where several sites were asking about their search rankings. The short explanation is that it turns out that our classifier for parked domains was reading from a couple files which mistakenly were empty. As a result, we classified some sites as parked when they weren’t.

I apologize for this; it looks like the issue is fixed now, and we’ll look into how to prevent this from happening again.

At the end of last year, Google announced that it would be targeting parked domains or “placeholder” sites so that they wouldn’t rank as well.

Related Articles

• Google: Parked Domains, Scraper Sites Targeted Among New Search Changes
• Too Much SEO? Google’s Working On An “Over-Optimization” Penalty For That
• Is Google’s “Over Optimization Penalty” Its “Jump The Shark” Moment In Web Search?
• New: Google Rich Snippet Tool Allows HTML Input & Product Snippets Go Global
• Google’s March Updates: Anchor Text, Image Search, Navigational Search & More
• Google Sending Warnings About “Artificial” Or “Unnatural” Links
• Google: No, We Don’t Use Akismet To Catch Link Spam

Credit: Library of Congress

April 15th marks the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, and there will be no shortage of news coverage (or hype) commemorating the event this weekend. The good news is that if you want even more information, facts, images and history, you can take a deep dive on the web to get to the bottom of the historic event. Here’s a roundup of a few sources that we think you might find interesting and useful.

Ancestry.com’s The Titanic Collection

• Passenger Lists
• Crew Lists
• Deaths at Sea
• Titanic Survivors, Carpathia Passenger List, 1912
• Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835–1974
• Record of Those Buried at Fairview Cemetery, Halifax, Nova Scotia
• Coroner Inquests and Other Information from the Coroner of Nova Scotia

Note: The Titanic Collection is fee-based. However, a free trial is available through April 15, 2012. You’ll need an Ancestry.com login/password. No no credit card is required to obtain one.

RMS Titanic Online Exhibitions

Titanic: 100th Anniversary (National Archives, UK) You can search passenger and crew lists here.

Posted Aboard the R.M.S. Titanic (National Postal Museum)

Titanic: Facts & Images

Images From The British Library

Images From Library and Archives Canada (via Flickr)

Images From Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog

Images from National Archives, UK

Images from New York Public Library Digital Gallery

NOAA Commemorates the 100th Birthday of R.M.S Titanic May 31, 2011

“Titanic” (Encyclopedia Smithsonian)

Titanic at 100 Years (The Big Picture/Boston.com)

Titanic’s Final Photographs by Father Frank Browne (BBC)

Titanic Inquiry Project Full Text (Searchable) of the U.S. Senate and British Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiries

Titanic in a New Light (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute)

The Titanic Sinking: Infographics and Timelines

R.M.S. Titanic and MS Oasis of the Seas: a Comparison (CBC) – The World’s Largest Cruise Ships Then and Now

Remnants of the Disaster to Be Auctioned (AP)

Titanic By the Numbers (History.com)

Titanic: Faces of the Crew (BBC)

Titanic Interactive Timeline and Route Map (History.com)

RMS Titanic: Videos

Titanic At the National Archives (NARA, U.S.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video: Titanic 86th Anniversary (via C-SPAN Video Library) Recorded April 13, 1998

On the 86th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, two authors discussed their books. Father O’Donnell is the author of The Last Days of the Titanic: Photographs and Mementos of the Tragic Maiden Voyage, published by Rinehart. Mr. Kuntz is the author of The Titanic Disaster Hearings: The Official Transcripts of the 1912 Senate Investigation, published by Pocket Books.1

Titanic’s Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of Shadow Divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler (Twelve; October 1, 2008) author Brad Matsen talked about his book with deep-sea divers and shipwreck investigators, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, both of whom assisted Mr. Matsen in writing the book

Finally, on Sunday April 15, C-SPAN will Air and Stream on C-SPAN 3: “Report Into The Loss of the RMS Titanic” (Video Preview).

The Titanic sank into the Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg 100 years ago on April 15, 1912. Of those onboard, 1,496 perished and 712 were saved. To mark this centennial anniversary, author Samuel Halpern spoke at the National Archives about the findings of a modern day report into perhaps the 20th century’s most storied disaster at sea.

It’s called WatchKnowLearn.org and it’s being developed for K-12 students and educators.

While I don’t fit directly into either of those categories I like to think of myself as a “lifelong learner” and for that reason WatchKnowLearn has become an essential reference tool for me, perfect for a quick knowledge “tune-up,” learning about something new, or even for a bit of reminiscing about my days watching Saturday morning cartoons (remember when cartoons weren’t 24/7?) with a animated version of a well-known fable.

The Content

WatchKnowLearn includes information and direct links about more than 32,000 “educational” videos from disparate sources around the web. The selection and curation is done by editors, many of them educators and education professionals like school librarians. WatchKnowLearn also has a media review panel consisting of several hundred members.

With so much video material out there (and much more to come), the focus at WatchKnowLearn is quality over quantity. Having experts reviewing and adding metadata to each entry is not only useful especially when it comes to educational material but also a major time saver.

Searching & Browsing

Searching the database is simple, as you might expect it to be. Since all videos include appropriate age-specific metadata you can limit your search from the outset for kids of a particular age using a slider found to the left of any search box.

All entries also include subject info that is hyperlinked so you can quickly review other videos within that subject.

While searching works well, for me the browse tool is not only useful but also makes discovery fun. Score one for serendipity.

The directory is organized hierarchically with top-level subjects including mathematics, language arts and life skills. Selecting any of them reveals many subcategories.

A Bit Of WatchKnowLearn History

Jimmy Wales is the well-known co-founder and face of Wikipedia. The force behind WatchKnowLearn happens to be the lesser-heralded co-founder of Wikipedia, Dr. Larry Sanger (he left the project several years ago). He also founded another crowd-sourced encyclopedia project, Citizendium. Dr. Sanger has led the development of WatchKnowLearn from about 2007-2010. Funding comes from the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi.

WatchKnowLearn’s advisory board also includes influential Harvard scholars Lawrence Lessig and Chris Dede, among other notables. As you can see—this is a serious resource for online learning.

A Few More Facts About WatchKnowLearn

• Most videos in English but Spanish and Chinese language interfaces are being developed and are now accessible on the site.
• Educators can create “ classrooms” to help organize video collections specifically related to the needs of their students.
• Nearly 16 million videos have been viewed via the WatchKnowLearn database.

Now, go forth and explore WatchKnowLearn and make sure to share this valuable learning resource with friends, family and colleagues.

You can also keep up to date with new developments at WatchKnowLearn News via Twitter and Facebook.

So, here’s a collection of direct links to databases, record books, searchable archived video and other material direct from the official information source for the Final Four, the NCAA.

Men’s Tournament

1. 2011-12 Men’s Basketball Statistics. Here, you’ll find four different types of data categories:

• Individual stats
• Individual game highs
• Team stats
• Team game highs

For rabid fans, many of these statistics can be downloaded in a number of formats including HTML, ASCII, PDF and CSV.

2. Men: Game by Game Stats for All Division One Teams

3. Men: Final Four Record Books (Since 2000 Season)

4. Men: Basketball Record Books (Since 2000 Season)

5. Men: Archived National Statistics (Since 2000 Season)

6. Men: Archived Team/Player National Ranking Summary (Since 2002 Season)

7. Men: Coach/Student-Athlete Lookup

• Find a specific coach’s all-time or year-by-year win-loss record (search by name)
• Find a specific student-athlete’s career or year-by-year statistics (search by name)

8. Men: Team-by-team yearly statistics

• Find a team’s year-by-year statistics
• Find a team’s year-by-year game results

9. Men: Searchable Video: NCAA Vault

• Video clips and complete tournament games from the NCAA video archive.
• The “Vault” launched a little over a year ago.

A compilation of links to several of the databases listed above is available here.

Women’s Tournament

1. 2011-12 Women’s Basketball Statistics. Also featuring four different types of data categories:

• Individual stats
• Individual game highs
• Team stats
• Team game highs

Again, many of these statistics can be downloaded in a number of formats including HTML, ASCII, PDF and CSV.

2. Women: Game by Game Stats for All Division One Teams

3. Women: Final Four Record Books (Since 2000 Season)

4. Women: Basketball Record Books (Since 2000 Season)

5. Women: Archived National Statistics (Since 2000 Season)

6. Women: Archived Team/Player National Rankings Summary (Since 2002 Season)

7. Women: Coach/Student-Athlete Lookup

• Find a specific coach’s all-time or year-by-year win-loss record (search by name)
• Find a specific student-athlete’s career or year-by-year statistics (search by name)

8. Women: Team-by-team yearly statistics

• Find a team’s year-by-year statistics
• Find a team’s year-by-year game results

A compilation of links to several of the databases listed above is available here.

Can’t Get Enough Madness?

• Official NCAA 2011-2013 Men’s & Women’s Basketball Rule Book (153 pages; PDF)

• Official NCAA Court Diagram

• If you’re a sports stats and facts junkie the ESPN Stats & Info Twitter stream is a must. This stream covers many sports and comes from ESPN researchers.

• The NCAA Stats Twitter stream can alert you to database updates

• Announcer Information

Enjoy the madness!

Without further ado, here are the first four (of many more to come).

C-SPAN Video Library

• Cost: free
• In three words, amazing, important, essential
• With a few exceptions just about every program that have aired on C-SPAN, C-SPAN 2, C-SPAN3
• More than 170,000 hours of content, back to 1987
• Advanced search interface
• Important to remember that C-SPAN carries more than what goes on in the Senate and House of Representatives
• Hours and hours of author interviews, political rallies, interviews with newsmakers and journalists and much more
• Most programs are full text searchable using mechanically generated transcripts
• People search allows you to quickly see if a person has appeared on the network and then link directly to the program(s)
• Example: Larry Page (he’s appeared on C-SPAN Twice)
• Many programs are embeddable
• Most programs appear in the archive within a day or two (if not sooner) of airing.
• The C-SPAN Video Library won a prestigious Peabody Award in June

Old Maps Online

• Cost: free
• Officially launched last week
• One search, centralized access to multiple digitized historical map collections
• About 60,000 maps available today, with more than 120,000 maps by end of 2012
• Keyword search, focus by date using slider, search by map
• Material included so far:
  • A Vision of Britain through Time, Historical Map Library
  • British Library, Map Library
  • David Rumsey Map Collection
  • Moravian Library, Mollova mapová sbírka

Archive-It

• Cost: free to search; fee for institutions to subscribe
• Archive-It is a fee-based service from the Internet Archive that works with non-profits, schools, governments and others to crawl and archive sites and pages they specify
• Many of the collections are available to all
• Close to 1,700 collections currently available
• Example: Archive of NASA Social Media
• Collections are updated regularly with new material
• Unlike the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Archive-It collections are keyword searchable

Road 2.0: Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions

• Cost: free
• Provided by Duke University Libraries
• More than 30,000 digitized images, with search/browse capability
• Most images are of outdoor signs from between 1930s and 1980s
• Advanced interface allows you to search by company, product and date

Now that it’s gone, where can searchers go for a more private search experience than Google and Bing offer by default? Here’s a list of a few alternatives. Note that different search engines below make different privacy-related claims; I haven’t investigated them in detail — i.e., by examining cookies, etc. — so anyone looking for a private search experience should do his/her own research.

Private Search Engine Options

DuckDuckGo

Probably no altrernative search engine has hung its hat more solidly on the privacy issue than DuckDuckGo. In early 2011, it made a splash with the launch of DontTrack.us, a website that illustrates how Google tracks searchers (and how DuckDuckGo doesn’t).

DuckDuckGo’s privacy page is very clear: DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information.

People are noticing, too. Last year, DuckDuckGo was included on TIME magazine’s list of the best websites of 2011. Earlier this month, DDG set a new record with its first million-search day.

Ixquick/Startpage

Ixquick has long advertised itself as “the world’s most private search engine.” Its privacy policy says that user IP addresses are not recorded and only sends one cookie to users’ computers — a preferences cookie that expires after 90 days. It does, however, collect and store “limited” user information — the date and time of a search, as well as the browser and platform used for the search.

Last October, Ixquick announced that it was making SSL encryption the default on all searches.

The same company also operates Startpage, which looks like the closest mirror of what Scroogle previously offered. Startpage takes a search query, removes all identifiable information about the searcher, and submits the search to Google anonymously. “Your IP address is never recorded, your visit is not logged, and no tracking cookies are placed on your browser,” Startpage’s home page explains.

Yippy

Yippy is a “family friendly” portal site with a search engine that came from its 2010 purchase of Clusty.

On its About page, Yippy says “We won’t track your activity on our platform, store your history in our browser, monitor or record your searches, store copies of your email, or collect any more personal information than you volunteer. We also won’t sell your personal information to advertisers for profit.”

Yippy’s Privacy page adds that international users (i.e., outside the U.S.) “are subject to forms of minimal tracking depending as required on the country from which they originate.”

Ask.com’s “Ask Eraser”

Although it’s shifting away from pure search to its Q&A roots, Ask.com continues to offer its Ask Eraser tool to searchers on www.ask.com and uk.ask.com.

Ask Eraser can be turned in Ask.com’s settings, which explains the tool this way:

When AskEraser is enabled your search activity will be deleted from Ask.com (not third-party) servers, except in rare circumstances described in the AskEraser FAQ. You can learn about the third-party partners who receive your search activity here.

Those “rare circumstances” include when Ask is asked to retain search activity data by law or government officials, or if the data is needed to “solve a critical technical issue.”

Google Encrypted Search

Ironically, one of the post-Scroogle options is Google itself, via Google Encrypted Search. While searches here are secure, it doesn’t actually solve the issue that Scroogle (and some of the sites mentioned above) addressed: Even when you’re using Google’s encrypted search, Google will know who you are (if you’re logged in to a Google account) and will still save your search activity if you’ve enabled the search history feature.

So, while it is a secure search option, it’s not private in the sense that the sites above claim to be private.

I should add, too, that you don’t have to visit the link above for Google’s encrypted search; in October, Google began encrypting all searches when users are logged in to a Google account.

If you think we missed any private search options, let us know in the comments!

Google Chief Health Strategist Roni Zeiger, MD, says the company sees users search on health symptoms and then almost immediately turn around and search for conditions they discovered in those initial search results. As a consequence Google is now going to “compress” that two or three-step process into one. Zeiger explains in a blog post this morning announcing the new symptom-related search results:

To make the process easier, now when you search for a symptom or set of symptoms, you’ll often see a list of possibly related health conditions that you can use to refine your search. The list is generated by our algorithms that analyze data from pages across the web and surface the health conditions that appear to be related to your search.

Below are a couple of “before and after” examples for “headache” and “trouble breathing and tired” to illustrate the change. The “after” screenshots were provided by Google.

Zeiger told me that nothing on the AdWords side would change or be affected by the new results. He also said that Google was being relatively conservative about when to trigger these results. People are also unlikely to see these symptom-conditions results when they directly search on medical conditions. For example, “chest pain” is the type of query that will trigger these results but not “heart attack.”

I asked Zeiger if there was any human editorial involvement or intervention here. He said that there was not; it’s entirely an algorithmic result.

In late 2010 the Pew Internet & American Life Project released survey data (n=3,001 US adults) that showed how heavily search engines are used to find health and health-care related information.

Source: Pew Internet Project (9/10)

1. High level site previews in search results
2. A multimedia search within a site function
3. A social layer which, among other things, allows Volunia users to share information and connect to one another

My sense is that it is the social layer which will be most appreciated by Volunia users. Let’s look at each.

Volunia Search Result Previews Offer A “Fly-Over” Site View

During his launch presentation, (in Italian, starts at 40 minute mark) Volunia founder Massimo Marchiori described search users as similar to chickens, trapped in cages and incapable of flying.

Users have been forced to choose search results by consulting one of those classic 10 item title, summary and link lists for too long. Wouldn’t it be nice if users were freed from their cages, and not only, were actually able to fly over a site, viewing a visual or a grid map, before committing to visit it?

Volunia, perhaps from volare, to fly, offers two types of high level site map previews, potentially freeing users from commitment tyranny. The first type, a visual map, aims to group areas of a site together in neighborhoods.

Figure 1: Volunia search result site fly-over: visual map

The second site preview map is in the form of a grid, reminiscent of computer folders. The expectation is that this format will be more useful to people searching from devices with small displays, like smartphones.

Figure 2: Volunia search result site fly-over: grid map

Interactive drill-down versions of the maps are also available from a Volunia menu bar which is visible while navigating a site. Site owners can improve the maps using a Volunia provided sitemap editor.

Figure 3: Volunia sitemap editor

Result previews aren’t exactly a new concept – Ask.com introduced their binoculars feature in 2004.

Where Volunia differs is in their choice to show a site map preview instead of a page preview. Many searches are indeed navigational in nature, one reason Google provides their sitelinks for some queries.

Volunia may be on to something.

Volunia Wants To Surface Multimedia Otherwise Hidden In A Site

Initially the primary focus in Web search was on textual documents, particularly the html kind, rich in semantic structure with their glorious title, heading and paragraph tags.

Oh, I didn’t mention the links between documents, did I? Other Web content formats, from PDF files to images and then video posed much greater obstacles to search engine indexing for a number of reasons.

Today, major search engines like Google offer navigation links to enable a user to search just images or video.

Ambitious searchers can usually find an advanced search syntax page which allows them to limit their searches to specific sites and file types, but for the most part major search engines have taken the “don’t make me think” approach, providing searchers with a blend of media types in search results, what Google calls universal search.

Volunia on the other hand wants to make it easy for a user to discover the multimedia richness hidden in sites like NASA by providing a very visible multimedia site search filter.

Figure 4: Volunia's multimedia search filter

The Web Has Come Alive, Says Volunia: Volunia’s Social Layer

It isn’t immediately clear how useful this feature will prove to be: after all, even if we want to follow the “wisdom of the crowd”, there’s no way to know if the site’s current visitors from Volunia are actually happy with their choice, nor would it be clear to what extent one searcher’s expectations for a page align with those already visiting that page.

The same visitor counts are also available as layers on the site navigation maps.

Seek & Meet: Interact With Other Volunia Users

What might arguably be Volunia’s greatest innovation is in letting fellow search travelers to a page interact with each other, what Volunia calls seek and meet, a feature which feels very reminiscent of Google’s now closed Sidewiki, albeit with two key differences. The first is that users can interact in realtime.

Figure 6: Volunia seek and meet interactive site chat

This birds of a feather real time information sharing might prove useful in a number of situations where people are looking for pre- and post- purchase information.

In the pre-purchase phase, a searcher might want to interact with other users to better understand the product or service they’re considering, not to mention to discover what alternatives others are considering.

Sometimes, it’s nice just to have confirmation that we’re making the right choice. In the post-purchase phase, searchers might be able to resolve support issues by consulting with other searchers – potentially reducing a company’s support costs while providing interactive peer to peer support 24 hours a day.

Each Volunia user is able to fill in a personal profile, much like any social network. The matchmaking possibilities are clearly endless, but I suspect it would be best if I don’t go there….

It isn’t rare to see glowing online reviews written by someone with a connection to a product or service, and equally harsh reviews from competitors or ex-employees with an ax to grind. It doesn’t take much to imagine people attempting to scam the system by introducing fake search users to interact with other searchers.

It remains to be seen if “seek and meet” really is something people will take to. Real time search collaboration will well depend on a critical mass of socially oriented searchers congregating on the same sites at the same time, no easy feat for a niche search engine.

Site owners will undoubtedly be pleased with the second apparent difference to Google’s Sidewiki: commenting can be disabled if desired, something Google didn’t allow.

Volunia, The Company, And A Few Volunia Tidbits

According to data published by Italian business paper Il Sole 24 Ore, Volunia was founded in 2008 by Massimo Marchiori and entrepreneur Mariano Pireddu, with Pireddu providing €2 million in funding to date. You might not immediately recognize Massimo Marchiori’s name, yet as an academic Massimo has been working on the theoretical issues of Web search for years.

His seminal 1997 paper, The Quest for Correct Information on the Web: Hyper Search Engines, would serve as one of the sources of inspiration for two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who would acknowledge Marchiori’s contribution to their own work, Google.

During Volunia’s beta phase, over 100,000 people are being invited to become “power user” beta testers. The Volunia user interface is in 12 languages but Marchiori said during the launch presentation that the actual index coverage isn’t limited to those languages.

The Volunia team has ideas for Volunia “extensions”, i.e. new functionality, which will be added to the core, the hard part which has already been done. Advertising will be added to the service.

Marchiori Says Social Needs To Emerge In Search

In an introductory video, Massimo notes that Volunia stems from an idea he’s harbored for several years, an idea for a “different perspective of what the search engine of the future should be”. In the Il Sole 24 Ore report Massimo said “The Web is a living place, there’s information, but there’s also people. The social dimension, already present, just needs to emerge”.

Bing, which started incorporating social signals from Facebook in 2010, and Google, which launched its social search in 2009, would probably both argue that the social dimension to search has already emerged. So would upstart blekko and to a lessor degree, the Russian Yandex.

Armani, Chianti, Ferrari… And Volunia

Volunia is based in Italy, not in Silicon Valley as one might have guessed. Italy actually has a history of search engine excellence. Google may well power most Italian portals today, but the talent behind a now defunct Italian search engine, Arianna, led Ask.com to locate its European R&D headquarters in Pisa.

The Reality Check: Search Isn’t Easy: Volunia Faces Many Challenges

The basic task of a search engine, finding, indexing and retrieving the world’s information, is a complex one. The size of the Web is immense. There’s the problem of searcher intent: we know what we’re looking for when we type a brief search query, but those few words are often open to multiple interpretations.

Google has conditioned searchers to expect lightning speed and mostly fresh and relevant results. Volunia will have to perform well on all these fronts and navigate thorny issues of privacy.

Many start-ups have nonetheless tried to compete with Google and Bing. Some, like Cuil, ran out of funding before gathering significant market share; others like blekko, with far greater funding, are still working hard to win over hearts and minds. Whether Volunia will be able to pull this off remains to be seen.

Kick The Volunia Tires Yourself!

Volunia has a sign-up form for those who want to try it out. Go kick the tires and support the underdog! From messages that I’ve seen on Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook, very few have actually had a chance to actually use Volunia, credentials are only dribbling out, most likely in an attempt to avoid problems similar to what Google faced when they first opened Google Analytics to too many people at once. I based the considerations made (and images) in this article on demo videos released by Volunia in order to give you a preview of what to expect.