Yoople, A Search Experiment in People Power
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It’s not surprising, with the rise of web 2.0, that a search engine should look for a way to combine user interaction with regular search results to improve its relevancy. Enter Yoople. Using Yahoo’s results as a jumping-off point, the early beta project hopes to do what the search engine itself hasn’t quite been able to manage: deliver better results through direct visitor interaction with the SERPs.
Technically, Yoople itself is not a search engine per se; nor is it, as it points out in its FAQ, a crawler, a spider, a substitute for search engines, or even a yogurt. It "is a Web 2.0 Application built on Prototype and Script.aculo.us and based on [the] Yahoo! Web Search API." This means in principle that it could also be built on top of Google's search API; indeed, the company says the name comes from combining "Yahoo! + Google + People." We'll see if Google responds to Yoople's advances.
So what exactly does Yoople do? When you put a search term into the engine, it gives you a page of 10 results. If you find that the most relevant result for your search is, for example, the sixth one rather than the first one, you can drag it from the sixth position and drop it into the first. Think of it as direct voting; you're telling the program that keeps track of this kind of thing (and presumably everyone else who performs the same search) that this is a better ordering of the results.
By the way, you're totally anonymous when you do it, as near as I can tell. There's no name that says who moved the result, nor is there any room for you to make some kind of comment as to why you thought this particular result should be in a different position. The only indications of a change in Yahoo's normal ordering appear in a gray line of text at the bottom of the link (about which more in the next section). Those who enjoy the kind of interesting back and forth within a community that can develop with social search engines such as Del.icio.us or Searchles will be somewhat disappointed.
Next: The Yoople Factor >>
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