Forum Moderators: bakedjake
The Smarter alpha is an experiment to create a search engine that significantly improves the search experience for the average internet user.Our hypothesis is that users are frequently dissatisfied with their search experience because user queries are often ambiguous while the available corpus of information available to be searched is huge and of variable quality. The Smarter alpha attempts to solve this problem by identifying probable user intent for popular queries, and then listing high-quality human edited web listings for these user intents.
The paid advertisement on this site is uniquely clear -- overture results. on the bottom of the page it says 'parts of this site powered by fast' in their about page they have different example keywords which covers formatting and styles the way it is displayed.
If this search engine built up their db asuming they have one it would be a nice clean site to use as a Search engine and call it Smarter.com
2) What's so special about it? Is it new, is it novel? NO.
3) Somebody mentioned this 'engine' here [webmasterworld.com] within the last couple weeks. :)
That being said, sure - it looks interesting?
Is it new? Nope. Different? Nope.
Their about page -> doesn't mean they will do something radically different. It's the same tired WiseNut / Alltheweb / Google / Teoma / AOL search, etc.
Sure -> we havne't really discussed it here before. But - just by virture of slapping a new interface on something that tons of people have already used - isn't really innovative / new / different.
Not to be hard on it, I wish them well...but this forum is for ones that are new / interesting / different / chance to succeed. Skinning the same cat the same way doesn't do it for me.
you may be the moderator of this forum and you may have a perfect image of what you want it to be, but i think users here might have a different opinion.
i mentioned smarter a few weeks ago as i think it is new + interesting, and once it gets going would be useful.
sorry, but you've gotta stop slapping people down for wanting to talk about other new search engines.
That said, I remember similar things being said about some other small search engine a while ago - what was it called?...oggle?...goggle?...nope, can't quite put my finger on it. :)
Good luck to 'em - diversity is always welcomed and is what keeps this sector striving forward.
R.
So it is using FAST/AllTheWeb exclusively?
Seems you get ATW when they don't have the search term completed. From their site ...
During this alpha release, we have developed Smarter results for an estimated 10% and 20% of user queries by volume. In the event that we have not created Smarter results for your query, we have partnered with FAST Search & Transfer to provide algorithmic results.
Search bmw [smarter.com] and you can see their approach to search results are different.
As we all know, there is a huge concentration of searches in the search world. People search for generic things like ‘travel’, ‘car’, etc. But what exactly does the query ‘travel’ mean? If you search for the word ‘travel’ on smarter.com, you will see things like ‘ground transportation’, ‘air travel’, ‘hotels’, etc….all of which are likely intents for the query. Now if you search for ‘travel’ on Google, you’ll see 4 travel sites, followed by two pretty lame government sites. Personally, I find Smarter.com results to be unique (and possibly more useful) for the searches they have built categories for. For all the Overture+Fast results, they’re just like all other search engines. I guess if they are on-par with all “other” searches, but are actually better for the most popular searches, then they are adding value. For now, they'll be one of two search engines I'll try.
Imagine if they properly released with 100,000s of terms using their new layout - it'd be great!
The problem is it seems like they've been in alpha for ages and havn't progressed at all in months (AFIK) and I hope that development hasn't stopped.
Anyone know if it still being worked on? or if any of the dev team use webmasterworld?
maku.
What is going to make me use smarter instead of google at the moment? Answer - nothing.
I heard this statement literally in 1998 IIRC. Instead of "smarter.com" there was google.stanford.edu and for "google" you have to substitute Altavista.
I think here in the Alternative Search Engines Forum should be the place to talk about engines who have just started or who have started a longer time ago, but failed to show any progress.
The problem is it seems like they've been in alpha for ages and havn't progressed at all in months (AFIK) and I hope that development hasn't stopped.
Well, that's kind of their problem: They've picked an approach that will never scale without a gigantic influx of money. They've got humans scrambling to create results pages for "popular queries". It's all reactive: they don't have "improved" results until after a subject becomes important to their user base.
That kind of approach is unlikely to impress users of more proactive engines like Google and AltaVista. In fact, it's even less likely to impress the kind so early-adopter power-users who built up word-of-mouth advertising for AltaVista and Google, because they're impressed by engines that do well on the obscure or complicated searches that smarter.com won't do well with. Comparing a young smarter.com to a young google.com is to to misunderstand what Google's strengths were.
I'm with Goodrich on this one: Smarter.com is not a engine that will make it big on the merits of its technology, because the tech isn't that impressive. Their only hope to become a big leaguer is to get a good marketing deal with a portal or other major site, and those kinds of deals are becoming increasingly rare.
sorry, but you've gotta stop slapping people down for wanting to talk about other new search engines.
Let's be civil, ok? Try reading through this forum for a while before making a statement like that. :)
They still haven't made the page work right in Phoenix ( a mozilla build web browser so it's pretty obvious they aren't listening to the 'feedback' and discussion that is happening here.
Any engine that takes itself seriously needs to listen to user feedback. Unless, of course, they don't have any interest in the desires of their users, in which case, they won't go anywhere.
See my post above where I said that the results page doesn't work in Phoenix, which was made over a week ago.
