Bill Gross, from the Idealab fame, has presented today his latest creation: Next Generation search engine Snap. In his rapid chatting style, he pleased the attendance of the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco by very quickly demonstrating the key differentiation points of this TRULY AMAZING technology. It was as though suddenly many of those features that we had been wishing for as search engine users had finally been delivered to us, in one fell swoop.
Disclaimer: I have not had time to check the relevancy of results, the breadth of the index, etc. But it really looks cool.
Bill Gross explained that the challenge was to provide more relevant, actionable, results. And whilst the breakthrough brought by the current generation of search engines was to build an index of the accessible web, and use prices and link strength as a way to rank results, more was required.
In order to deliver on actionable results, Snap came up with 3 key innovations:
- User Control: Provides an increased control on search results through smart filtering.
Example: Type in "Jaguar" and you will get typical results with a number of filters that can be used to restrict results. Typing OS in the "Web Results" filter will restrict the result set to those contains the string OS. Other filters (on popularity) can also be applied.
- User Feedback: Indicating what other users have searched and clicked through, which allows Snap to provide a behavioral pattern for a given search term. This data was gathered from usage information by ISPs.
Example: Typing "Car", a generic term, provides a list of possible actions (and ads of course) based on the usage information extracted from ISP logs. Typing in "camera" provides a custom list of filters based on the characteristics of... cameras (like resolution, zoom, flash range,...).
- Transparency: Snap will also make available to advertisers all revenues, traffic information, etc. for the site, or on a per search basis. That will bring them an increased visibility on what is going on, and will allow them to optimize their ad placement strategy.
Users and advertisers will also be able to pay for transaction completed, amongst other model. This is a proxy for satisfaction.
Whao.
PS: For more conference coverage, Jeff Jarvis has been blogging sessions in real-time.
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