Shadows In Motion

Okay, I’m pretty excited about this one.

How would you like to control which keywords will return a specific site in a search?  Better yet, how about you, the user, being given the ability to flag any site returned as spam, thus giving the community the power to get rid of those crap sites that love to clog search results.  Excited yet?

Let’s say that you’re searching for information about coffee but your search results are only returning sites trying to sell you coffee products.  Finally you find what you’re after.  You click “Add More Tags” and toss in a keyword that you know will work better for the site that you found, then maybe you add a comment in the search engine that anyone who finds the site can read, and then you go about your business.

Or perhaps your search for coffee information is cluttered by a bunch of squatters.  So you click once, maybe twice to confirm, and you flag the website as spam.  You, along with the rest of the community, eventually make these squatters vanish from search results.

Thandora, a new “Web 2.0″ search engine by AdventNet Inc allows you to do all of that.  In some respects it’s similar to Digg.com, but it’s missing the community-driven ability to boost a site to the front page.  I would really like to see the ability to vote on tags added to Thandora.  Theoretically, this would be used instead of complex algorithms to determine how relevant a website is to people’s searches.

The catch?  Thandora, for now at least, it is limited to being a yellow pages for businesses, but I can easily see this (or a spin-off) exploding into one of the primary search engines on the web.  Services such as Google, Yahoo and MSN may eventually appear archaic compared to the new tag powered, community driven search services.

As a business, you will be glad to know that submitting your site to Thandora is a very simple process that is also powered by tags.  You enter your website’s name, the web address, a description, your email for verification, and you give your site what you think are the best tags to associate with your business.  Here is a screen shot of the site submission screen:

Your site is quickly and automatically added to the search engine after you click on a verification link in the email that’s sent to you.

There of course are concerns with this new approach to search engines.  Spammers will no doubt exploit the comment feature and I wouldn’t be surprised if they find a way to exploit the tags, as well.  Companies may start to flag their competitors as “spam” in an attempt to get rid of them, or at least in an attempt to kick them to a distant page.  If the community did have the power to boost a site to the front page as I suggested above then spammers would surely try to take advantage of that, as well.

If they can misbehave then they certainly will misbehave, but despite the technical hurdles I am very excited about this.  This is a service that I’ll be keeping my eyes on.

I’ll close with a couple of additional screen shots of Thandora.  As always, click them for a larger view.

Links for this article:

• Thandora
• Digg.com

~Mysk

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, tags, tag powered search