Younanimous Social Search Engine
While John was hoping for an early retirement, the deal unfortunately fell through, so he’ll still be the predominant writer for John Chow dot Com. That only makes sense (and thousands of dollars in John’s case). Despite this, Mitchell Harper and I will still be around to do guest entries every once in a while, like this post, where I’m doing a ReviewMe review of Younanimous (pronounced like “unanimous”), a social search engine that aggregates the results from the powerhouses in the industry and then improves on it.
Who Needs Another Search Engine?
Good question. With so many to choose from already, what would make you want to jump off of the Google bandwagon and take Younanimous for a spin? Well, just as you shouldn’t put all your eggs in the Adsense basket, you may not want to rely solely on Google for your searches as well. Where Younanimous wants to set itself apart is that they aggregate the information gathered from Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and combine it with user-provided information to give you not the most numerous results, but rather the most relevant.
In addition to the usual short excerpts attached to each result, this social search engine gives you the Google, Yahoo!, and MSN ranking on the side, as well as information regarding the site’s Alexa ranking and Google PageRank. There are also several links to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious, so that you can immediately add the desired page to your collection.
The Social Aspect of Social Searching
The process is still in beta — according to the Younanimous FAQ, it’s more accurate to say that the entire site is in “alpha” — but later on, they also hope to implement both a passive and an active “voting” system, wherein actual users, and not just spiders, tell the algorithm which results are actually the most relevant. This helps to bury the spam and minimize the effects of evil link-baiting schemes (we should all know the power of those by now).
When Younanimous officially launches, you’ll be able to get a free account to save your settings, voting results up and down. In your settings, you can blacklist pages or even entire domains from showing up in your personal listings. You can also tinker with the relative weight given to the three different search engines, what types of files shouldn’t be listed, and what extra information (Alexa, etc.) to display.
For the passive side of things, Younanimous installs a cookie on your computer that tracks which results are actually useful to you. How does this work? Let’s look at the example offered by Younanimous itself.
You do a search for “Social Search Engine” and you click the first result. It’s not what you were looking for at all, and is therefore not a useful result for your query. You press the back button and try result #2. Voila! You found exactly what you are looking for. But it’s more than that. Yournanimous is analyzing these results and has cast a vote for you automatically, saying that result #1 wasn’t what you wanted, but #2 was.
More Than Just Text
I can really appreciate the ultra-minimalist approach that the developers of Younanimous took in the aesthetics of the site. There’s no useless clutter to fill your computer screen, just like the main page of Google. It’s everything it needs to be and nothing more than that.
Also just like Google, you can click on over to look for images, in addition to the “normal” search engine results. And because it’s a meta search engine, you’re getting the widest range of relevant results. In the future, Younanimous plans to add another tab to let you search for videos, presumably from sources like YouTube and Google Video.
To conclude, my primary complaints are that 1) you’re limited to just a single page of results at this time (though that should change when they get out of beta) and 2) getting results can be slower, because they’re grabbing information from several sources. I’m not talking about an eternity, but it can take about a second and a half. Based on these early impressions, though, I’d say that Younanimous has a very good thing going. Check out their blog for the latest developments.
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Trackbacks
- New metasearch engine « Best of Marketing Online Private - April 3, 2007 at 5:26 am
- Untwisted Vortex - Living in a Different Land » Blog Drive-Bys for 2007-04-04 - April 3, 2007 at 10:11 am
- Cool Tools & Articles About: Wikipedia, Link Love, Site Popularity, Social Search Engines by TimeForBlogging - April 7, 2007 at 9:11 am
- Younanimous Becomes AfterVote « John Chow dot Com - April 12, 2007 at 12:00 am
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Yay!! My site is number one in the search for my name!! That’s a good sign for me!!
Ahaha! Yeah, that’s usually a good thing
Nice post!
Yup!! One of the requirements of a Dot Com Mogul…
Agree david, a very important requirement to make money online
Ah.. But which search engine should you be using… Google?
oh…I’ve been top on Google for a while now…not that hard with my name..
It’s a bit harder for me since name Alex is quite competitive on the keyword market
I’m number one for my name on Google
I own my name big time
i have a google twin that shows up in the results too tough. He’s an author…
Still something I’m working on, haha. Hopefully soon though.
I hope My Name give result my website too
Same here
another 150 bucks for john!
Too bad he doesn’t contact advertisers directly, he could probably be banking the entire $300.
yup, i’ve always thought of it, why not just contact people DIRECTLY. After all, we’re talking about 50% Save, it’s not small.
Business Ideas
Part of the ToS of ReviewMe and ReviewMe is giving him exposure to people who might not otherwise know about his blog.
So in order to be a review me publisher, you can’t do any private reviews?/
You still can.
I wouldn’t like to back-stab a company that makes me 3 figures a month. where are the good old ethics?
I’m always skeptical of new search engines. While this does sound like a good idea, I think I’ll wait and see how it does before deciding it’s the next best thing in 2.0
Yeah, it’s slow so until that changes, there won’t be droves of people going to it. Besides, this isn’t the first time someone’s created an aggregate search engine.
…But this one seems promising, don’t you think?
I think this is an excellent idea. It sounds similar to what that wikia guy wants to do with his search engine. That one hasn’t been released yet.
The big problem I see with this search engine is the name. Who is going to remember how to spell younanimous.com every time they go to search? Its so much easier to type in google or Yahoo.
They should register the domain younan.com or something easier to spell and remember.
This is an excellent point. I must type in google.com at least 10 times a day.
Yeah, I never thought of that, but you’re right. The domain name is way too long.
hmmmm
I suspect they will (if not already) cache results for some of the top search strings.
I’ve been using this off and on for a while, I think it’s a novel idea.
– Scot
It’s a good idea but their approach is a bit flawed. From a software designers point of view it’s cluttered, slow and cumbersome, but I do hope they do well because it’s only a matter of time until we wave bye bye to Google.
But if we wave bye bye to Google, then their system gets hosed. They need the big engines to drive theirs. For that reason, they’re incapable of making big.
I disagree, Google has the top talent working for them…I don’t think they are going anywhere.
Google made it to dictionaries. word ‘google’ is grammatically correct noun, verb and whatnot.. Goooooooogle will never leave the throne!!
Meta search engines are old news.
However, the voting aspect will be interesting (digg clubs for Younanimous?)
hmmm…first time i’ve seen it john, that was fantastic and user friendly kind of search engine. you can find all things in one shot. thanks for the info.
user friendly search engine? It’s a text box and a search button. They’re all user friendly…
It sounds like a really good search engine, but it all depends on whetther everyone starts using it or not.
Agree…
Well, if it’s really good, everyone will start using it eventually, right?
The more the merrier; I say bring on the search engines and let’s party!
People will eventually get tired of Google. It’s human nature. Look what happened to altavista.
The question is, which search engine will take over.
Ummmm, I’m not sure people switched over to Google just cause they were bored of Altavista.
I completely agree. We don’t change the tools we use because we’re bored with them. People didn’t start using the automobile because they were bored with horses. It was a better tool for the job. Until someone trumps Google’s ability to provide good answers to your questions, they will remain on top. Most people don’t care about Page Rank or Alexa Rank. This SE doesn’t do much to provide a better tool.
I think a lot of times people loose site of the fact that Google isn’t a service designed to allow the webmaster to get his site posted for certain terms…but a service to provider the searcher with the most relevant results for a particular search.
I read somewhere that people who originally use Yahoo also use Google, but those who originally use Google stay only with Google..
Oh my God, I’m not the first for my name!
It’s actually a mexican baseball player from the 60s
Gotta change that.
Start getting links with your name on them, that’s the fastest way to go…
I think search engines are just getting better, competition for google would be nice. I like the idea that chacha.com has however people abuse it with fake searches.
ChaCha is definitely doing something different – and has a real chance to provide a better service than Google.
The only real competitor Google has at the moment is Yahoo!
Michael, Nice post, but your name does not appear in the RSS feed, so we’re left with this odd feeling of “Who is ‘I’?” in your first paragraph. Perhaps something to consider for future posts. Thanks!
Ah ah ah!!!
Nice post!!!
Yes, very nice site. I am number 1 for my name as well. John Chow is second for my name. I guess that goes to show the influence a site with a lot of traffic has on keyword placement. It puts John at #3 with Make money online, so thats ok.
John is in front of me for my blog’s title
I use http://www.conglomer.com. Works great and is A LOT faster then younanimous. Plus it’s WAY easier to type…conglomer conglomer conglomer…see!
bookmark bookmark bookmark.. duh? BTW, conglomer is not bad at all!
Not that interested, I’ll stick with google.
Hi John,
I posted about Younanimous earlier this week. I think they have a lot of potential. The social icons next to the results are a nice touch. You can read the post here:
New Hybrid Search Engine Looks Promising
Sounds pretty interesting. I liked Wink as an idea, but they seem to have abandoned the whole social search thing for people search.
I tried 2 types of search, 1 with my name combined into 1 word and i got top ranked. I got the 3rd rank when my name is not as 1 word. So which search result is better?
I’ve been using younanimous all day today and I must say, it’s pretty good actually.
Tall Street is a better social search engine.