OneRiot social search engine claims not just same old

Stan Beer
Thursday, 13 November 2008 08:18

Your IT - Home IT

Talk of a new search engine being launched these days is likely to cause a roll of the eyes and thoughts of oh no, not another Google wannabe. However, the OneRiot social search engine does lay claim to one major point of difference - freshness and relevance of search results. So where's the difference?

The difference, according OneRiot CEO, Kimbal Musk, is that OneRiot taps into the pulse of the Web. So what does that mean?

Still in Alpha, OneRiot prioritizes search results based on their current popularity among internet users, sort of like social networking news sites. According to the new search company, this makes OneRiot’s search results fresh, relevant, and pulsing with the real-time energy of the Web.

“When you search with OneRiot, you’re finding the pulse of the Web,” said OneRiot's Musk.

“The OneRiot community—a group of more than 2 million people—share what’s important to them as they surf. They help us find the freshest stuff to read or watch in relation to any search query.”

According to the OneRiot people, traditional search engines treat the Web like a library, often returning results from highly-referenced, dependable resources such as Wikipedia. While these results are undoubtedly authoritative, they do not necessarily reflect what people are talking about right now in relation to any particular topic, they say.

Hence, a search for “Obama” on a traditional search engine is likely to bring up a Wikipedia page, or the official Democrat Party Web site. The same search on OneRiot is likely to bring up a YouTube video from a speech he gave this morning, or a blog post that commentators are buzzing about right now.

“OneRiot is set to build on the success of services previously available under the Me.dium brand name,” said Tobias Peggs, VP of Product and Marketing of OneRiot.

“We’ve had millions of people download our popular toolbars and sidebars for Firefox and IE. Now, as OneRiot, we can allow all internet users – even those who haven’t downloaded our software – to find the pulse of the Web on any topic. We’re also excited to continue working with our fantastic partners including, Microsoft, Yahoo and Mozilla, to bring OneRiot to as many people as possible.”

A quick peruse of the OneRiot home page provides a feel for what the new search engine is trying to achieve. Like Google, it's a simple no frills search page but has an added list of what the most recent hot search topics happen to be right now.

In addition, search results are returned with a rating of the popularity of a particular result - emerging, surging or raging.

As the product is still in Alpha, it's not clear whether the business model is going to be yet another search advertising play or even if the popularity search algorithm works as well as the OneRiot crew claim. However, priority and relevance of search results is an issue which OneRiot aims to address.