Mooter

[Brett_Tabke]

New crawling, full indexing engine with what appears on the outset to be: promise:

[mooter.com...]

I kinda a like it. It is a very impressive start! (it's one of those clustering/kartoo like engines)

[mooter.com...]

"Users shouldn't have to work hard to find what they want. Mooter sets out to solve the problems of most search engines by understanding the psychology of how users interact with information.

"Mooter analyses the choices you make while searching, then reorders the results based on what you are actually looking for at that moment without you having to go back and rephrase your exact needs."

So instead of giving users long lists of scrambled results, Mooter displays simple, sensible categories of information. As users search, the algorithms shuffle the results in the background, ensuring that more relevant results are displayed.

[Chndru]

i think it is slow, since it searches for all the clusters. If you click on the second or third page results (it loads them fast). This algo might need some optimization tune-ups ;)

[sanity]

Where do they get their results from?

Good question!

[killroy]

Just typed in my domain, guess what I found in the cluster, mydomain-info.com with a EXACT COPY of my entire site. And this guy obviously knows what he's doing. What's my cahnce of "scaring" a guy like that you steals content on purpose?

SN

[Liesl]

Yeah, we thought we would only get people from 'down under' giving us a spin for the first few day. So while we were sleeping.... But now we are working.

[petra]

I'm very impressed these guys will be a force to be reckoned with. But I would still like to get an answer about their results source.

[heini]

Hi Liesl, welcome to WebmasterWorld, thanks for stopping by. So your servers are already smoking? ;)

[Liesl]

Yes, our servers are smoking. If you use mooter second time, you can 'moot quicker' and it goes straight to reults with clusters on left, no starburst page. also defaults to colour of your choice if cookies enabled.
We were hoping to grow by word of mouth, but the Aussie press got their hands on us...

[pleeker]

Sure am hoping to get something a little more creative from ya'll.

Tabke'd. :)

I don't like the 2-step search.

Amen, SlyOldDog. Teoma and Vivisimo do it right. Here are the SERPs, and over here are some related topics/searches that might help you find what you're looking for.

I'm not a fan, and not just because it just crashed Safari on me.

[EliteWeb]

Need more colors red/blue isnt enough need customization of it fully ;)

mMmmm I think it would be cooler if it were quicker to manage the results. It took a while when i first searched, redefined searches and more to the cluster seemed to go quicker.

[tbear]

>>.....EXACT COPY of my entire site....

I too found a copy pirate on my first search.
Where do I complain?

[Chris_D]

Hey Sophie - good to see you - I left that big 'ol agency and have hung out my own shingle just a couple of weeks ago ....

Liesl - can you tell us where the results are coming from? Do you have your own index - or is a meta? I actually noticed some Webwombat stuff?
and, personally - I think 'mootergal' would have been a better nick.... you know - we've already got a googleguy here...

: )

Chris_D

[Liesl]

2 step search:
- when you use mooter for the second time you can bypass the 2-step by 'moot quicker.'
We wanted first time users to see the conceptual grouping, because thats a major differentiator, and with a more 'traditional' format our test users just didn't realise how different we are.
Those of us who have been using Mooter since May now use the quicker option. We also find other engines annoying after mooting for a while, but thats another topic!

[Chndru]

new message on it's homepage

Please be gentle with our Beta server - who'd have thought a brand new search engine that did what it said would be so popular?

Tabke'd! by pleeker

[Liesl]

thanks for the colour comments. Some design people wanted us to drop giving people a choice altogether and impose a colour on searcher, but we decided to stick with it. Partly because we are pretty obsessed about choice, and concerned about possible future gradual stripping of choice by commercial search interests. So with that mantra, the choice of colour remained. Wld be happy to look into more cusomisation in future, but want to keep UI clean too.

[amoore]

well now I know what a mooter is.

http://labs.google.com/glossary?q=mooter&btnG=Google+Glossary+Search

[Kandevil]

Thats a very interesting definition :) Still cant get the search to load, I'll wait.

[sanity]

Hey Sophie - good to see you - I left that big 'ol agency and have hung out my own shingle just a couple of weeks ago ....

Nice one! Feel free to drop me and email and tell me more. Email address on contact page of website in profile. :)

[amznVibe]

To be honest, if Brett hadn't brought our attention to this engine I don't think I would have given it much thought. In my humble opinion:

First it's very obviously beta, so the press releases and news articles are lots of hype before it happens - a classic example of marketing and sales people overruling the techs (seen this at every company I have ever worked for - very fustrating).

Secondly, big questions of the source of its data; no apparent spidering (I have a month old site that is in there but I can't find them in my logs anywhere), no documentation of robots.txt being obeyed, etc.

Third, technology it's based on appears to be non-validating html (using metarefresh for redirect?) on basic apache servers running java applets? (Java is one of the slowest known code executing environments - even sun has said so)

Last but not least, it feels very bulky and less intuitive to me. Sure there is a market for more advanced users but I can just imagine some of the people I have to train weekly trying to use this. Google shoots for the lowest common denominator being able to find stuff and allows the power users to take advantage of the less "in-your-face" advanced features. There is way too much on the screen with mooter and my eyes don't know where to look and what to focus on (there are also obvious bugs with objects overlapping other objects but I attribute that to beta).

Good luck with the Australian market. I'll check back in six months and see how they are doing. Points for trying something new but I'm more interested in attempts like Gigablast that are lean and mean and have market proven features (and results).

[jeremy goodrich]

It needs to work faster for 'joe user' to catch on to it, (finally got it to load).

Pretty slick & nifty, though. At least they are breaking some new ground, instead of being yet another wanna be Google :)

[Liesl]

ha! who would wanna be google?
we have ability to metasearch and do own spidering. We started with metasearching, and some of the big boys suddenly blocked us when the press picked up the story. We have/are adapting. will also be upgrading server within next 36hrs.

[mat]

You might want to consider letting people know how your spider will identify itself before you let it loose - there are a lot of .htaccess blockers here and elsewhere.

[Liesl]

Moot means open to debate, no two humans are looking for the same thing when searching, so why should search engines assume relevance is the same for all?

If you use 'all results', we actually re-jig results dynamically based on underlying themes of websites you looked at. sort of dynamic personalisation. Don't collect info on searcher though, session based only.

[shaadi]

Looks good, my website is in the index, but not ranking well :(

[edited by: shaadi at 6:55 am (utc) on Oct. 22, 2003]

[jeremy goodrich]

My bet is that they knew they'd be talked about here & hand tweaked to rank me for my name :)

LOL.

[penfold25]

i just thing its a big shame the aussie press got hold you before the public did, i think you should personally kick there butt. Its very hard to live up to such expectations when you only just started.

In anycase, my two cents is this.
I use google because it is very fast and accurate
and minimises spam as well, also most importantly it is all on the ONE page.

(i used to use yahoo, took too long to load up on my 56k modem and too much crap on there homepage).

People want it now, i do not want to click here and there and everywhere to find my results.

Why would i want to use your site instead of google, alltheweb, these companies have spent millions why would it be better, people actually do find the results they want on these engines 9.95 out of 10.?

in anycase good luck

[percentages]

Lee, Good luck to you! Any and all competition to Google has to be a good thing.

I haven't yet had a chance to try out the quality of results, but look forward to doing so when you "wake up" from sleeping mode :)

[keeper]

I've just tried to access Mooter after reading this lengthening thread, and they seem to be in the middle of a server upgrade.

Nice one. I didn't even get a chance to search and you guys broke it.

Back up at: 0800GMT+10

[caine]

It's down at the moment with a message to come back latter when they have upgraded their servers, well i hope the heads up from BT will get the ball rolling for them.

[TheDave]

That 46kb logo cant possibly be doing them any good..

What I did see of it earlier I quite liked, although as others have said, it's a bit slow.

[Goober]

Google has a sense of humor, searched for Mooter, got this:

"Did you mean: motor?"

Haha

Goober