WhittleBit

New Search Engine Tries A New Personalization Scheme

[iseff]

From Slashdot, WhittleBit [whittlebit.com] is a new search engine that attempts to improve its results by allowing you to choose pages which are closer to your actual search. So, in theory, if I were to search for "cars" intending to find the price of a car I wanted to buy, I could rate kbb.com a thumbs-up and avis/budget/enterprise/herts (ie. rent-a-car places) a thumbs-down and it would then return more specific results to buying a car (such as autobytel.com). However, I tried that, and it doesnt work quite well yet. Though it did do a good job on one of my sites (which Ill keep quiet for rules).

My question is how does it keep this log? I assume its on the users computer because they state you must have cookies enabled to do this. However, I believe they would be very ignorant and foolish not to send results to their server. An easy algo could show that if 75% of people rate widgets-for-me.com a thumbs-up for a search of "widgets", and 80% rate widgets-for-you.com a thumbs-down, their results should initially show widgets-for-me.com as number 1 and widgets-for-you.com below. Of course, a whole new era of spamming sites would start to come into effect, but as we have learned with Google - its in your best interest to play fair or dont play at all.

All in all: this is a great new idea. Im all for it. If you read my other posts, personalization is what Im all about. It is, IMO, the ONLY way that search is going. If you want to be the next Google, get on personalization - and this engine is a good start at that.

-Ian

[jeremy goodrich]

Cookies is how nearly every engine does their "personalization" schemes at the moment.

The thumbs up / down is interesting, though one cool "widget" hardly makes an engine :)

And that display...I like to have a description in my SERP so I know if it's what I want or not. Just using a title like that...leaves a bit to be desired, imho.

Their db - I dont' see anything about how big, # of pages, etc - and their results need work.

Who knows, perhaps in a year or two it could be interesting to watch.

[olwen]

The results look like Google to me, I tried a couple and they were identical.

[jeremy goodrich]

Yep, Google 100%.

So hardly a "new" engine at all. ;) Clever trick.

[sidyadav]

But somehow I don't like this Search engine, its because it doesn't give a description of the results, no cached, no URL, no size, Only the title. No use.

[d2003]

I wouldn't call it a search engine. " Red Thumb downwards " for WhittleBit.