Sunday, May 25, 2008

Introduction to Scoofers; a social search engine

This first post I will give an introduction to Scoofers in general; how we came up with the idea, what we changed during the last year and what our short term plans are.

Early 2006 I discovered a technology by Google to mix Google results with self defined search results, even for other people. These internet searchers needed to subscribe themselves to your links. Google calls the technology CO-Op or subscribed links. I put a button to subscribe on these subscribed links on the website of our online marketing consultancy company and thought that we could give people free tips on online marketing topics that got blended with Google results. Nicely added value and maybe some extra customers. Hardly anybody subscribed, mostly because a Google account was needed and in the Netherlands penetration was maybe 5% then. But the idea was nice.

Later Google came with the concept of a customized search engine. The basic concept is that Google provides a free search tool for searching on your own website or on websites concerning a specific topic, like ' pet food' or ' online marketing'. Simultaniously I was dissatisfied with results in search engines and Google was introducing Universal search. Now in Google you saw a lot of pages in de results that were not directly giving you what you need, but a lot of pages were just made for Adsense and another extra step in the destination of the searcher. On top of that Universal search is to my opinion not a strong move by Google. Too much wasted space on the first page of the SERP's.

What's the solution? Back to the old day's, before Google, when we tried to organize everything in directories? Or just use the social bookmarking sites like del.ico.us, Digg etc. Hey, Why not blend those all?!! Why don't we make a search engine that use the technology and database of Google, re-organised the results based on the labels in the directories that thousands of experts in years of time have provided us and boost the sites a but that are popular on Digg etc. That's how we came up with Scoofers, refined search. So we did: we used Google Co-op and customized searh engine technology and use the content on Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Yahoo directories, DMOZ and many more.

Introduction is planned for mid june.