A new crop of search engines bases relevance on the human mind instead of
algorithms.
On Thursday, PreFound.com said it would begin to share ad revenue with
active users of its site.
PreFound is a community-oriented search engine that lets people search,
tag and share their searches with others; it launched
in January 2006. Members can create their own personal pages containing
organized groups of links sorted by topic and sub-topic.
Experts known as “Featured Finders” who take the time to gather the most
relevant and recent information on specific topics will receive 100 percent
of the Google AdSense revenue that their individual
pages generate.
Featured Finders will be responsible for finding, tagging, and sharing
organized sets of links and annotations on their expert topic areas that
they have found on the Web. Searchers will be able to visit each expert’s
page and view the Featured Finder’s PreFound selections.
“Our plan is to reward experts in their fields along with regular users
who’ve proven they can share useful and popular material,” said Steve
Mansfield, CEO of PreFound.com and its parent company, iLOR, in a statement.
According to Mansfield, paying people will help ramp up the site’s
content, while reducing the visibility of spammy or slopping pages.
Experts interested in participating in the PreFound.com Featured Finders
program can apply at www.profound.com.
Other sites too are looking for the human touch in improving search
results.
Dumbfind, a two-year-old search provider, also plans to offer an online
community where users can submit and tag content to help determine search
relevancy and discover new sites. Dumbfind combines tag search with keyword
search to better refine results.
Dumbfind automatically tags all the content in its database, groups them,
determines which are most relevant, and displays them in clusters. Founder
Chris Seline said the concepts of tagging and “folksonomies,” wherein users
create their own categories, are a good jumping off point.
“We have a large seed database of tags,” he said, “but it could benefit
from user input. There may be certain ways people might describe things that
our technology might not capture.”
Improving results could also improve ad revenue. PreFound’s Mansfield
pointed out that users of his site’s topic-specific pages are more easily
targeted by advertisers.
Eurekster recently launched Swicki, a search/wiki combo that lets Web
publishers and bloggers offer topic-centric searches designed to give their
communities of users more relevant results.
Publishers can focus and train their Swickis by typing in keywords and
relevant URLS.
Then, Swicki technology automatically learns from search behavior on the
publisher’s site, constantly refining search results in response to what
site users clicked on. For example, a traditional Web search for the word
“labor” might return results focused on childbirth, labor legislation and
unions. On a site catering to pregnant women, searchers consistently
clicking on links related to childbirth would eventually increase the
relevance ranking of such links, so that only they would be shown to users.
In a statement, Eurekster CEO Steven Marder said, “Currently, publishers
lose traffic to generic search engines because they don’t offer their users
a Web search with a differentiated or specialized value-add that retains
them. Unique search results not only help build user loyalty, but also lead to greater search-driven
advertising revenue, he said.
The idea of human editors is as old as Web search itself, of course. The
original Yahoo was a simple, human-edited list of links to sites. About.com,
founded in 1996 as The Mining Co., paid subject-expert Guides to create
channels. About.com was sold to
the New York Times Company in February 2005.
