While we all await the opening of Wikia, join me in taking a closer look at another one of ‘em “meta-hybrid-social search engine” which just launched a couple of days ago and which goes by the name – EarthFrisk. Wait, is it just me or are the search engine branding getting obscure if not utterly funny?
For awhile I thought EarthFrisk was an environmental website, but it is not. EarthFrisk prouds itself as a people’s search engine powered by a meta-community with a facility for social rating of its community members. Ok, in simple terms, EarthFrisk is one of those social search engines that collects search results from once again the various existing search engines, filters these results, and presents the most relevant results to users.
Michael Lodispoto, managing member of EarthFrisk.org said:
“We’ve created the first search engine where the community can vote and comment on the very best search results, which are the top searches of Google, MSN’s Live and Yahoo, among others, all with less spam.”
With the dearth of social search engines that keep sprawling on the web, the most important thing that these search engines must do is come up with a feature that is unique to itself if not at least unique to some other meta-search engines. For EarthFrisk, it comes in the form of a rating system. EarthFrisk’s patent pending rating system allows community members to rate websites, blogs and even people through color value scheme. EarthFrisk displays a the ratings on a the EarthFrisk toolbar which can be downloaded and installed just like your ordinary search engine toolbars. The EarthFrisk toolbar is fully customizable where you can put a link to your own site.
Does EarthFrisk gives better/relevant results? I supposed so, considering that it collects results from other search engines and web information portal.
The good thing about EarthFrisk which other meta-search engines of its class do not have is a control panel to specify which search engines, social media or other web information portal to crawl when conducting a search using the EarthFrisk toolbar. And when you click on a specific search engine, EarthFrisk will redirect you the search engine’s portal’s SERP for the search keyword that you used.
As for its name-EarthFrisk I’d go by the saying that if you can’t say something good about something, better say nothing at all.
Earthfrisk, as in we frisk the earth and find it all. The site is taking off nicely and improving every day. The basic theory is many eyeballs acting as spam destroyers can do a better job than any computer. That and allowing voting and commenting on search results with our own rating system makes for a well balanced search engine.
Its really not the first @ anything.
Both aftervote.com and url.com have been doing exactly “social meta” search for years before this site. I suppose being able to choose google only or yahoo only is a new feature, but if I only wanted google or yahoo, I would visit google or yahoo.
I looked on EarthFrisk. It didn’t find methanol, and it was impossible to register – I couldn’t login, but my email was used????
It isn’t yet good quality web application.
There is a lot of competition recently with metasearch engines – grab search from google, replace google ads with yours, and get money. I think google will tolerate this while metasearch ads share will be < 2-5%.
EarthFrisk tries to add some value – allowing users feedback, and this is important, but I doubt they will succeed
Mikhail – finding methanol gives similar results to Google and Yahoo. That’s the purpose of the search engine. It is to give the best results from Google, Yahoo and MSN and then offer readers and searchers the ability to then comment on and vote on these results. How it is the first (Dan) is we have our own rating system and toolbars for Firefox and IE and people’s comments and votes translate to better search results and the search engine listings.
Mikhail – you can find anything on earthfrisk.org, make sure you press enter after you put the search term in or click search.
Here’s your search for Methanol.
http://www.earthfrisk.org/search.php?search=methanol
As a new search engine we’ve had lots of criticism, but having a problem finding something has never ever been said by anyone.
I went to the search engine and was able to use it effectively. Good job!
Quick question: what is the difference between Meta & Hybrid Search Engines, if any. Does anyone know?