throk.net

Younanimous.com, (you + unanimous), is a new search engine based on the very pillars of web 2.0, which is the idea of community and user generated content. What set’s younanimous apart from all the other search engines is that basic user behavior helps rank the results. The idea stems from the simple fact that once a user finds what they are looking for, they don’t search for the same thing again.

So think of it like this; say you are searching for a widget and you get 5 results, you go and you check out the first result and its not what you need. You check out the second one and you don’t need that either, so you hit your back button and you go to the third result, blam it is exactly what you needed; so shouldn’t that be ranked higher than the other results?

I think the greatest thing about this method is that it circumvents the problems with the other search engines just serving up the same crap time and time again. This is not only frustrating as a user, but even more frustrating as a web developer. I’ve used Google for my primary search engine for years, however I’ve noticed that when I’ve made a website for a company or a restaurant that these results never make it to the top few pages. All that happens is that I get results to websites with outdated and irrelevant information.

Recently this has been the case with one of my newest websites, thehappyhourhero.com, this website is basically a happy hour listing directory, showing the details of the drink specials at bars. It would be cool if one day people from all over the nation will use it, however for right now it just has the happy hour specials for about 50-60 bars in mostly Virginia Beach and Norfolk. The HHH website has been up for 4 or 5 months, and it doesn’t even appear in any Google search for “happy hour Virginia Beach.”

This is simply ridiculous because no other website have this information! I’ve followed all of Google’s requirements and recommendations; using Google sitemaps and very search engine friendly URLs to no avail.
However, if you search for “happy hour Virginia Beach” on Younanimous.com, and it is in the top 3 results number 1! It takes years to get up in Google’s rankings. I think this is where Google has become a victim of their own success. Spammers have targeted Google in order get top billing for their websites, and this exploitation of Google search has led to their search pages becoming excruciatingly stagnant.

Back to Younanimous; another great feature, especially for a developer like me, is that the search results have a wealth of information at the user’s fingertips. You can see the page ranking, site statistics and links to popular social bookmarking websites right on the entry. It’s like having a very concise and efficient dashboard on every search result! Even though Younanimous is very young, I believe only days old as of this post, it is showing exceptional progress and promise.

This is truly a very exciting time, I guess it goes to show that there are still people out there that can make a difference, take on the big guys, and ultimately push for innovation in a way that can inspire us all.
Bravo Ron, Dan, and Trite!

* I just wanted to say that I’m going to simply publish this prematurely b/c I’m tired and I don’t feel like reading over this, I will probably update this tomorrow, so if this makes no sense at all, please forgive me.