Yoople, A Search Experiment in People Power - Moving Stuff Around
(Page 3 of 4 )
The results for pizza have been moved around a lot; it's very easy. If you check one of the earlier pictures you'll see that there's been a lot of jockeying for position between Papa John's, Domino's, and Pizza Hut. But since I'm rather annoyed that Pizzeria Uno didn't even turn up in the first 30 results (which I could only get to by clicking an arrow at the bottom of the page), I'm going to have a little fun.
Look at the second entry. It shows up as the twelfth item in Yahoo's results for pizza, but here I've been able to bump it up to number two! It's worth noting that it took me several moves to get it there; when I tried to move the result that was in the thirtieth position up to number two, Yoople wouldn't let me. When I performed the pizza search again after engaging in my manipulations, Little Caesars once again showed up in position 12.
Incidentally, you can also move listings down. As with moving entries up, though, there's apparently a limit as to how far you can move them. I couldn't move the entry in the number two spot lower than the number five spot. I don't know if Yoople has some kind of algorithm for this, or what it's based on: number of times the entry has been moved? How far it has been moved? The usual direction in which it has been moved?
If this particular approach to improving search sounds familiar, it's because Google has tried something similar with its SearchMash experimental search engine. I don't know if it's still one of SearchMash's features, but when I reviewed it some time ago you could move the results around, and the next time you ran that particular search, the search engine took your indicated preferences into consideration.
Next: Room for Abuse? >>
More Search Engine News Articles
More By Terri Wells
/ 4 
