Sproose looks to goose the search biz

You old-timers once traversed the Internet using search engines like Alta Vista or Inktomi. Then came Google and it was point, set, match. But one constant in the history of this business is that that no front-runner has a guaranteed lock.

So it's been fun watching the emergence of a burgeoning class of start-ups including the likes of Spock, Wink and (coming next month), Powerset. On Wednesday, the final version of Sproose goes live.

This search engine adopts a slightly different tack, borrowing on the social-networking model to display its rankings. Call it a spin-off of the wisdom of the crowds approach. Users will be able to vote for video and text search results, thus voting upon the reliability (or popularity) of a given result on Sproose. The more votes, the higher the ranking. The fewer the votes, the lower the ranking.

I'm sure the system's inevitably going to run up against wisenheimers who try to game the results. But that shouldn't pose an obstacle if enough people participate. If it works as anticipated, community vetted rankings may prove quite useful. Something like Yelp but for Internet searching.

[david drew]

sproose a goose ?

the problem is using social network-ing models embeds a normative bell curve of behaviour on "likely" post responses with the most popular responding toe the bell peak. thios may not reflect "real' world democratic perceptions except where writ large aka "wiki" entries once they receive a "sufficien" critical mass. The internet can be notoriously used to distort perceptions and to penalise non-conformist views (remember spamming, or the ability to post multiple votes) hence the search engines may not reflect truth. besides distortion is so easy , with some software one can analyse speech patterns and mimic any individuals' speech style (even mails or blogs) such that it can be hard for others to differentiate only 15% or so of the world's population is fully connected, the burden of health disease in Africa is about AIDS and starvation and netblogging ain't on the radar: because China and India will have the internet population numbers within a few decades or less, does that mean those will be the prevailing views. the "market" place has and always will be a place of gossip, so as always caveat emptor. a classic present day dilemma is trying to "green" everyone's behaviour: everybody want's to pose as a "green" warrior, but when it comes to modifying behaviour there seems a fair body of evidence that people have deepseated concerns about big changes or changes driven by guilt and are very slow to change. The present "hip " generation gen Y's and X's , have never really been denied or had to share anything : essentially de-consumerist behaviour where people actually have to make painful , compromise choices using fewer resources etc. Car choice behaviour seems well ahead of house size choice: would you carpool or bike pool sooner than share a house with strangers: anyone keen should consider Webers "open society" paradigm rather than just Doug mckenzie Mohr's "Social marketing" model; the social change will affect the model and voter patterns. . it depends whether the Jones's are well informed or stupid, reactionary or adventurous and modest aka( de-consumerist) or plain greedy, don't -give-a-fig: if if spruce is about goosing the sales figures that is what will happen. This is not an attack on anyone just an acknowledgement of the "behavioural difficulties" that gee whiz instant voting style can create