Yoople is a search engine where users get to re-rank the results if they find the results of greater relevance. The collaborative search looks to leverage social power to bring relevancy to results.
The engine works by fetching the top 10 results for a query from Yahoo and permits users to drag and drop the results in different order. While on one hand it could be described as the best combination of algorithm and human assessment, it could also be a manipulator’s paradise.
There is also a restriction on how high you can rank an entry. The engine uses a color coding scheme to show the relative position of the result compared to previous entries. The engine also tracks how often the result has been moved around. And there is the Yoople factor to measure the difference between the ranking of the result on Yahoo and on Yoople.
It is an effort to combine the best of the search engines out there with the human element. However, as with other technologies, if it does become a success, then it will be more prone to being manipulated. That is the angle that the Yoople team should really work out.
The approach by the Yoople team seems a lot akin to that of the Wikipedia. Keep it open and finally the good work will prevail. But unlike wikipedia, that is a destination, a search engine is more of a passage way. If the passage gets polluted, it will be abandoned for ever.
It will be interesting to see how the Yoople team gets in technology to prevent large scale manipulation of results.
Comments
4 responses so far ↓
Jim McDonald on Dec 3, 2007 at 7:08 pm
If they find a way to control potential abuse, I think this refinement, as simple as it seems, could be huge. I would definitely use something like this as long as the SERPs that I landed on already had a critical mass of visits/ranking changes.
2GoodGuys on Dec 3, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Yoople is a really cool concept of adding the human element into search results. I agree controlling abuse is an area the people at Yoople will have to take seriously. Love the concept.
Wayne Smallman on Dec 4, 2007 at 8:04 am
This is precisely the kind of thing I’ve been both hoping for and writing about for some time.
However, it could be that Yoople have a fight on their hands — Google Labs recently rolled out a project that’s sort of doing the same thing.
Admittedly, there are differences, but Google have the much greater footprint of the two.
Plus I imagine Google are eager to back-fill this void they left to StumbleUpon to fill while they busied themselves getting a collective clue about Social Media…
Erin on Dec 4, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Google does already have something like this in the works
http://www.google.com/experimental/a840e102.html
I think once Google’s goes live this site wouldn’t be able to gain the amount of traffic to make it a success.
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