Meta search engines are nothing new. They take the keywords you search for, submit them to several different search engines at the same time, and return a combined result. AfterVote, formerly named Younanimous, adds a Web 2.0 spin to meta search engines. It’s voting, but not quite as you know it.
Aftervote admits on its own FAQ page that there are “just 3 guys keeping AfterVote online” using “money from our normal jobs to pay for the servers and the coding work is our own.” So what can three guys working after hours accomplish? Well, that depends on their starting point.
In this case, the starting point is the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN (or is it Microsoft Live?). AfterVote doesn’t have access to their algorithms, but for its purposes, it doesn’t need access. It hopes to deliver more relevant results than any of those three can alone, thanks to three factors working synergistically.
First, by taking advantage of the fact that there are three heads at work instead of one, AfterVote shows you how all three search engines ranked any one particular result. Presumably, if it wanted to it could filter results to show you only the ones that all three search engines agreed are relevant, or at least put those at the top. (In fact, it might actually work that way; I couldn’t tell easily from my research, but it did seem to work that way when I tested it).
Second, AfterVote brings Web 2.0 to search by adding a voting mechanism. It’s not exactly the kind of voting you think though. Yes, you can actively vote links up or down the way you would on other social sites such as Digg. But AfterVote also takes advantage of “passive voting” to determine relevance.
Passive voting kicks in when you engage in a behavior that anyone who has ever done a search will recognize. AfterVote describes it thus: “You do a search…and you click the first result. It’s not what you were looking for at all…You press the back button and try result #2. Voila! You found exactly what you are looking for…AfterVote(Younanimous) is analyzing these results and has a vote for you automatically, saying that result #1 wasn’t what you wanted, but #2 was.”
Third, AfterVote gives its users a variety of ways to weight their results. You can also save your results to various social networks. Reading through the AfterVote blog is an almost dizzying experience. The company seems intent on letting users customize the search experience in just about any way that might deliver more relevant results. Having said that, it’s time to take a look at AfterVote and see how well it delivers on its promises.
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