Youlicit Invites Us to Rediscover Search - Social Aspects
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After you register, you can fill out a short profile where you detail such information as your gender, date of birth, geographical region, interests, and so forth. The sites you recommend, by the way, will turn up in your profile page, as will keywords related to your searches. Here's the page Youlicit created for me, after I played around with it a bit:
I know, it's not very clear. But the links listed under the “My Sites” tab are the ones on which I clicked the “recommend” icon. You can see that Youlicit has already started a keyword cloud for me in the “My Interests” box on the right. Just below that, there is a box for “similar users” (not yet filled, probably due to too little data) and finally, a box for “my active fans” (also empty). I can choose to browse Youlicit or my own sites in the search box on the upper left. The “My Friends' Sites” tag is empty, because I have no friends yet.
The “Discover!” tag is interesting. Click on that and you receive a list of recommended links based on your interests, updated every hour. Here is evidence of Youlicit fulfilling its promise to help its users search less and find more. Many of the sites listed were definitely on topic given the ones that I recommended. Seth Goldin's blog was on the list, as was an item on Yahoo's latest performance breakthroughs. I was disappointed by the second link; it appeared to be a blog entry on Funtastic about a comparison of 100 different products and their packaging (titled “Advertising vs. Reality”), but the link led directly to the site rather than the story, and the article was not a recent entry.
There's nothing wrong per se with Youlicit. But as I used each feature, I found myself reminded of many other social search sites that I've used and reviewed before. The idea of giving you suggestions while you search isn't completely original either; a company called Watson once offered that service, but has since gone out of business. Youlicit was certainly easy to use; it delivered what I consider to be uneven results, but that's par for the course with this kind of search engine in the early days. I really didn't see anything here that made it rise above the pack. And for a start-up search engine, that's not only disappointing; it can be deadly. I hope they hang in there, but they'll need to be a little more creative – or deliver much better results – to really capture my interest.
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