New search engines “facilitating” our search needs…
Lately new types of search engines have emerged and quite a fair deal of them are garnering some hype on the blogosphere as well as on regular media. One such service is Scoopler, which was launched in beta state just last month. They describe themselves as a true real-time search engine:
We aggregate and organize content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. We do this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, we give you the most relevant results, updated in real-time.
- directly quoted from scoopler.com/about/
The concept sounds somewhat intriguing, but risky and far from fool-proof. If the search algorithms aren’t properly configured they’ll surely run into problems with regard to relevancy of the returned search results. A quick test run proves that the search algorithm simply returns search results in chronological order from a select social media sites such as Twitter, Delicious and Digg (reason I’m only mentioning these three are due to the fact that mainly these appeared with my search queries).
Interestingly, the search results are dynamic and hence the search results page updates whenever something related to your query is posted on one of the monitored services. This is both laudable as well as a major hindrance to their service, since searching a popular topic makes navigating through the search results a real drag if you forget to leave your mouse above one of the returned results (whenever mouse hovers over a result the page will be on pause mode… but if you move your mouse, for example to scrollbar on your browser, the pause is released and the results start updating again). Provided you find something interesting you must remember to visit the link right away, because soon the link most likely is nowhere to be found as more recent results push the link, which you were going to visit, further back. In addition, the quality of search results is rather questionable as long as people use abysmal tagging and especially since there’s no way to arrange search results according to relevance but merely the simple logic of what is most recent. I can only hope they’ll improve the search algorithm and give users more freedom regarding the presentation of the results – as such their search remains rather useless, although caters some users’ needs (which perhaps account for 1% of a person’s true online search needs). Given the topic being searched requires timeliness and the user is willing to bear with the horrendous navigation where you might lose an interesting result whenever you don’t keep mouse over the results and use only middle mouse button or keyboard for scrolling the page.
There’s room for doubt whether these new kind of services are even properly trialed and tested with authentic end-users – in case their development is driven by users’ feedback, these services might actually have a chance of being successful. For what’s it worth, I couldn’t find anything worthwhile or even remotely interesting with my set of test queries such as “music production”, “marketing”, and “evergrey”. Actually “evergrey” returned only a link to mp3 song on imeem without any other results – this is somewhat surprising, because that Swedish metal band is not so unknown… Google returns 792 000 results for the same query. Another Swedish band, In Flames, returns someone’s post from Twitter with exact same time stamp 9 times in a row. Scoopler’s functionality indeed is in question when a search for “in flames” (including the quotation marks in the search term) returns another band, Dragonforce – Through the Fire and Flames, which is a totally irrelevant search result. In conclusion, I would assume Scoopler to be in beta stage for quite some time when this is the quality their search algorithm possess.