Many have lamented the rise of apps and the return of “closed” proprietary platforms  (e.g., Apple, Facebook). Recently in a widely discussed interview Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin pointed to “walled gardens” and government censorship as threats to the established web. He later clarified that the biggest threat to the web was from government censorship and not Apple.

One of the reasons that Brin and others don’t like apps is that their internal content is not indexed. Plenty of apps surface in search results but not what’s inside.

A number of app search engines have arisen to confront the so-called “app discovery problem.” Among them are Quixey, Chomp (recently acquired by Apple), Appsfire, Appolicious and Xyologic. Yahoo has built an app search engine; and one can also search Google Play for apps of course. Bing also dabbled in app search for a time.

The central difference between most of these sites and Quixey is that the latter is not simply indexing and searching mobile apps. Quixey characterizes what it does as “functional search” rather than app search. It’s indexing available apps across platforms (including the PC), as well as web content pertaining to those apps.

The idea is that users will enter queries that describe tasks or goals to accomplish rather than specific apps or even app categories. For example, in response to the query “learn french,” the search engine produces a range of results that show mobile apps but also “apps” for Firefox, Facebook, Mac and Windows (both paid and free).

Quixey won’t go so far as to say that it’s a direct competitor to Google. However it does regard itself as more effective for discovering apps and app content (broadly defined). It also suggests by implication that it’s something of a Google successor in some respects. It uses the tagline “a new type of search” on its site.

The company was founded in 2009 and has raised just over $4 million to date. Eric Schmidt is an investor. It’s also talking to various third parties about powering their app search. This is something that other app search engines are doing as well.

In one way of looking at the world apps now represent a parallel universe of content to the more traditional “open web.” HTML5 may eventually succeed in bridging the two worlds; however that hasn’t happened yet. Many assume and some are banking on the idea that apps are now a permanent new way to deliver web content — whether in mobile or online. In that arena Quixey is trying to the Google for the new apps era.

Related Entries

• App Search Engine Appolicious Introduces “AdWords For Apps”
• In Chomp, Apple Gains A Social Search Engine For Apps
• Chomp: An Apps Search Engine Or “Yelp For The App Store”
• New comScore Study Suggests 50 Percent Of Local-Mobile Search Happening In Apps
• More People Now Using Mobile Apps Than Browser — comScore

Diego Basch, a former Senior Software Engineer at Inktomi, who is now Director of Engineering at LinkedIn explained why on his personal blog.

He outlines the major signs of the fall of Inktomi when he noticed most of the engineers at Inktomi using Google to find content, instead of Inktomi. But why? Why did Inktomi fail? He feels there are many reasons but the core reasons include:

• Inktomi didn’t control the front-end, they feed results to their partners such as Yahoo who controlled that search results experience.
• Inktomi didn’t have snippets or caching despite his efforts to do so, he was shot down by the executives.

Basch explains:

In short, Google had realized that a search engine wasn’t about finding ten links for you to click on. It was about satisfying a need for information.

A few Florentines, mostly former colleagues from the Italian internet company Dada, set out in April 2011 to develop a new search engine, Attrakt, which would focus specifically on hosting specialized search engines curated by the Web community.

Attrakt’s Index Relies On Curator Contributions

As such, Attrakt isn’t a generalist search engine, with a broad index ready for everyday searches. Attrakt’s index is primarily seeded through links specified by curators of custom search engines, what Attrakt calls boxes.

As in the early days of Wikipedia, if you’re lucky enough to search on a topic someone has already curated, then you might be impressed. But for the most part, Attrakt is fairly empty, a problem Attrakt partners Andrea Dotta, Luca Ciavarella and Gabriele Miceli acknowledged won’t be resolved until Attrakt reaches a critical mass of contributing editors.

Putting Attrakt To The Test With Schema.Org Rich Snippets Use Case

Users can explore Attrakt’s potential by searching or creating a customized search engine on a topic of particular interest; the Attrakt team mentioned travelling in Italy and 80s synthpop among many examples. These two illustrate the use multimedia in addition to textual resources. I decided to try a search marketing use case: the Schema.org semantic web markup standard defined and supported by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex.

By implementing Schema.org standards, websites can enable the display of many types of enriched search results, what Google calls rich snippets. Enriched results can be very beneficial for Web marketers and users alike but there’s a lot of material to wade through.

There’s the official standard, supplemented with separate documentation from each search engine. Extensions are available for many CMS‘ including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and IBM WebSphere. Google, Bing and Yandex each offer testing tools.

Armed with around 60 selected links to pages and sites regarding schema.org and rich snippets, I created a new Attrakt box, or specialized search engine. Searches using the resulting Schema.org Attrakt box provide answers from these curated resources.

Creating an Attrakt custom search engine is a fairly straight forward process. An editor needs to provide a name for their engine, assign a category and country and add a few tags.

Each link is then specified together with a few attributes such as a link category (e.g. Blog, News, Tool, Official) and whether Attrakt should index just the URL or the entire site. The link categories allow an end user to browse through the links assigned to each of these categories.

Overall, the creation interface could be simplified: entering 60 URLs, one by one, is a tedious process. It would be quicker to paste all the URLs into a single form, assigning categories in a successive step. The box country should be optional. The topic of many curated search engines, including this one, will transcend geography.

Link categorization is also problematic: should an official Google blog post on Schema.org be tagged as Blog, News or Official? While at first glance blog might seem to be the best answer, a Google Blog Post is really an official company statement which in of itself is often a news item, which happens to appear on a blog publishing platform. Clear?

Once a custom search engine box is created, it can be modified or deleted, although the use of grayed out text for the edit link both makes it hard to find and implies it isn’t available as a function.

To be fair, the Attrakt team is continuing to refine both the user interface and the underlying search engine technology. By the time you read this article, much of what you see will undoubtedly be improved. In the future, it will apparently be possible to assign a link to multiple categories. Attrakt is also working with researchers at the University of Florence on algorithmic solutions.

Once a box is created, it can be shared with others via a link. Attrakt will periodically crawl a box’s URLs to check for changes. Box curators will see a message display when Attrakt detects changes. It would be nice if they could also receive notifications via mail or RSS, similar to the way Google Alerts works. Search box curators will be able to embed their Attrakt search box on other sites, a feature planned for May 2012.

Are Curated Search Engines Really Useful?

A curated search engine potentially has two specific advantages over a generic search using Google, Bing or Yandex. The first is it will exclude content which strictly speaking answers the query but is of low value, like the plethora of parrot posts which appear just after a Google blog post is published. It often seems that 9 out of 10 repeat the official news without adding any additional insight.

A second benefit is to surface specific content which might not have otherwise showed up in a generic search. At the time of this writing, Bing’s Schema.org testing tool is poorly indexed in Google, but can be found browsing the Tools links of the Attrakt Schema.org search box.

Attrakt Wants Crowd Sourced Curated Search To Go Social

The quality of a custom search engine depends on the ability of the curator and on the technology providing the search results. Currently, Attrakt will display the user name of a box curator, but there’s no way for a casual user to determine if the curator is authoritative or not.

Attrakt currently collects profile information during the user registration process; it would be nice if they would also display profile information together with other box attributes. Such display would also give search box curators a greater incentive to contribute quality search boxes to Attrakt.

Attrakt highlights some hot search boxes on their homepage, but it isn’t possible to search for a search box on a topic nor is there a directory of search boxes.

In some cases, search boxes are listed next to results in a general Attrakt search, although there are some geolocalization issues still to work out. Attrakt primarily relies on a search box’s author to promote a specific curated search engine.

Attrakt search boxes are curated by a single user. It would be interesting to allow collaborative search box editing, similar to Wikipedia’s support for multiple authors. In a world filled with spammers, this isn’t so simple to successfully implement.

Attrakt plans on adding a robust social layer – a layer which will undoubtedly make Attrakt much more attractive to curators and search users alike.

On this point, Attrakt says:

Users will soon be able to follow each other and each others’ boxes, create elaborate user profiles to declare their areas of expertise. A Twitter stream will soon help animate search boxes with up to date content. Boxes already have static URLs for sharing, and sharing will be encouraged by share buttons.

Outside of the Attrakt platform, we’re planning on using twitter to drive traffic to peoples’ search boxes using relevant hashtags, and if a twitter account is present in the user’s profile we’ll tag that user.

Attrakt Is Still In Early Stage Of Development

A reader would be forgiven if they have the idea that Attrakt is very much a work in progress. The Attrakt team began armed with a dream and a modest €50,000 in self-financing. They’ve come a long way in a year and attracted an additional €500,000 in funding but are still months away from realizing the product they have in mind.

Mindful of this, they’ve eschewed seeking out press coverage, preferring to release and refine features out of the limelight. However, a site focusing on Italian news tipped me off to this new source of traffic, so now you know about Attrakt too.

Services Similar To Attrakt

Google’s customized search is probably Attrakt’s closest competitor. Many websites have added a basic version of it to supply a quick and easy site search, although it also includes features like Attrakt’s link categories, what Google calls refinements.

Perhaps the primary difference, beyond Google’s algorithmic prowess, is that Attrakt says its embedded search boxes will be advertising free (Attrakt does carry advertising on their site).

Attrakt also facilitates the sharing of curated custom search engines and plans on further differentiating themselves with additional social features. Readers can compare the search results for the same Schema.org resources indexed by Attrakt and Google.

Mahalo has positioned itself as a human edited search engine, but they don’t crowd source their contributions.

Delicious is by far the most used collaborative bookmarking service, however they don’t actually index the content of the saved bookmarks.

Volunia is a social search engine also from Italy, however their focus is more general.

Attrakt Opportunities For Marketers

Attrakt offers marketers the opportunity to demonstrate their personal or company expertise in a particular subject area through the creation and promotion of a curated search box.

As with all things social, the rules of the game have changed. The most successful search boxes will include comprehensive coverage of a subject domain, even if that means including resources from competitors.

What Webmasters Should Know About Attrakt

Attrakt robots.txt Support

Attrakt supports the robots exclusion protocol, known as robots.txt. Attrakt’s crawler is called attrakt. If Attrakt is crawling the site, web server logs will contain the user agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; attrakt/1.0 +http://www.attrakt.com)

Meta tags are not yet supported, nor is there support for sitemaps.org and schema.org protocols.

Keyword Tracking In Google Analytics And Similar Systems

Attrakt provides search query information in URL referrers using the defacto standard q=<query> URL parameter name/value pair.

Users of most digital media measurement systems will need to add recognition logic for Attrakt searches, otherwise Attrakt will show up as a simple site referer. Google Analytics asynchronous tracking code users can add ['_addOrganic','attrakt.com','q'] to their tracking code.

The story behind the Attrakt name? When asked, the Attrakt team demurred. Its origins seem to be lost in the sands of time.

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.

FindTheBest is a kind of “anti-search engine” and the brainchild of DoubleClick founder Kevin O’Connor, who launched the site to provide better information than he believed was available in general search results:

FindTheBest.com was created out of my desire to organize part of the Internet, filter out the excessive junk and present information in a simple, comparable way. While the web is great at making seemingly infinite amounts of information accessible, the Internet can be a little overwhelming in that it doesn’t allow for straight up apples-to-apples comparisons, nor is it transparent enough to allow you to spot those hidden marketing schemes influencing the data you receive.

The site aggregates and presents structured data to enable users to compare products, institutions and services. It aggregates that data from mostly public sources. However the site is not a product or travel search engine per se.

With the addition of local classifieds FindTheBest aims to provide more context and data around the listing to help people make more informed decisions. For example, car listings show how the price of the vehicle being considered compares to the average price of others in the same model year, as well as all cars in its class/category (e.g., sedans). There’s also additional information about the make and model, including gas mileage and safety recall information.

All the listings data right now are coming from third party sources and feeds. Eventually FindTheBest will add self-service but will likely charge to prevent spam. CEO Kevin O’Connor believes that the depth and quality of the data the site has differentiates its classifieds listings from most others in the market, including but especially Craigslist.

FindTheBest would also be a potentially good candidate to provide structured information to Apple/Siri, not unlike Wolfram Alpha. I previously observed that FindTheBest is, in one way, the realization of the now defunct Google Squared.

FindTheBest has raised a total of $6 million in venture funding to date.

Related Entries

• FindTheBest Succeeds Where Google Squared Failed
• “Anti-Search Engine” FindTheBest Adds Buying Guides, Top 10 Slideshows
• DoubleClick Founder Launches Structured “Decision Engine” FindTheBest.com

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

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.

Yandex . . . has purchased a license for digital maps supplied by the leading global location content provider, NAVTEQ. These digital maps will be used in the development of a detailed world map for the Yandex.Maps service.

NAVTEQ has provided Yandex with maps from all over the world, including highly detailed maps of Europe, North America, Australia and developed countries in Asia. These maps show intercity motorways, urban traffic networks, streets and buildings. Yandex.Maps will gradually add new content both to its desktop version and to its mobile application that supports all major platforms. Using the Yandex.Maps API, website owners can embed maps of various countries into their resources.

The company has been running a test with Navteq data in Turkey. Above is an image from Yandex Maps (pre-Navteq) of the San Francisco Bay Area. Yandex now joins Bing and Yahoo in heavily or totally relying on map data from the Nokia subsidiary.

The reliance of major search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Yandex on Navteq for mapping data sets up a kind of global divide of sorts among mapping sites “powered by” Navteq and Google Maps (and those in its network). There are other, independent mapping providers out there like deCarta as well.

Yandex recently lead a $30 million round in independent search engine Blekko. Yandex operates in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Turkey and has a presence in Palo Alto, where its Yandex Labs is based.

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We do not have to speculate as to whether there are new entrants in vertical search services such as comparison shopping and local search and review sites. There are new entrants in these market segments all the time. A new comparison shopping site, FindTheBest, launched by the co-founder of DoubleClick last year, just raised $6 million in venture funding over the summer.

FindTheBest, call it a “decision engine” or “comparison engine” if you like, allows users to see detailed, side-by-side information about an increasing range of things from financial advisors and colleges to smartphones and ski vacation spots. It’s what Google aspired to create on an automated basis with Google Squared but was unable to do.

Today the site has introduced a much improved redesign and user interface that makes it considerably more usable than it was before. The site had great data in the past but was too cluttered and complex to use. Now the streamlined interface will enable it to attract many more users and much more mainstream attention.

FindTheBest has an algorithm that mashes up user and expert ratings on products, services and institutions. It’s a kind of next-generation consumer reports. Currently the company monetizes with display ads at the margins of its pages. But it’s likely to be acquired before it needs to truly worry about monetization, given all the data and content that it’s compiling.

The company previously raised $6 million in VC funding, as Eric Schmidt mentioned in his Senate testimony.

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