inter:digital strategies

Pig! No . . . snout! Pigtails? Girl! Eat like a pig! Act like a pig! When pigs fly?

Most of us have, at some time or another, played the game Pictionary. For any who haven’t, it’s a simple game where you are given a pencil, a piece of paper, and a word or phrase - and have to indicate to your ‘team’ what it is that you’re trying to represent by drawing.

It can be a fun game, if you’re a little bit artistic. Less so for those of us with less-than-stellar abilities to draw straight lines.

3d-seek, as mentioned at Search Engine Journal today, is a search engine which gives you the option to search by sketching. It’s a very unique idea, I’ll grant it - but it didn’t do much for me.

To be fair, it was originally designed as a tool for manufacturing firms to find their needed replacement parts. And, to accommodate this better, 3d-seek allows you to upload your 3-d model of a part and use that for your search.

However, to continue being fair, the company wants to branch out into a commercial search tool for small businesses and consumers:

prove equally useful for ordinary shoppers: instead of having to go to the hardware store lugging, say, a specific plumbing joint, a customer could just sketch what he or she needed to find an exact match.

Quoted from 3d-seek as published by Search Engine Journal

So you no longer need to know the name of your part, you merely need to be able to draw it. The site renders your crude sketch and compares it to their stock 3-d models of each part. My tests? Total failures.

Like I said, I can’t draw worth a damn - but at least, given pencil and paper, I can make a pretty good try at it. However, drawing with a mouse takes away even my more rudimentary skills - like drawing a straight line.

I find it more than a little unlikely that many homeowners have 3d-models of their needed parts around. I also find it less than likely that they’re likely to have a Wacom tablet to help them out. Even with their 3-d model in my other monitor, I was unable to reproduce the drawing effectively enough to have the same model occur as a search result.

My conclusion? This is a really neat idea. The average searcher may make use, on occasion, of the option to search through their models to try and find the appropriate part. However, running down to the local hardware store with your broken part will probably continue to be faster and more convenient.

As a further note, the product requires Active-X and, of course, only functions in Internet Explorer.

Barry Schwartz, of Search Engine Roundtable, posted a short note at Search Engine Journal today about theAccoona search engine. Accoona describes itself as an "Artificial Intelligence Search Engine" - which seems like it may be a bit glorified, to me.

The basis of its so-called Artificial Intelligence technology is that the search engine learns to "learns to ‘understand’ the meaning of words, so users can ’super-target’ keywords during searches for relevant results in priority order." (ABC News) In my brief play time with the search engine, I saw no particular evidence of any behavior which was different from any other search engine, however. Perhaps they haven’t launched this technology yet - the article above, from ABCnews.com, didn’t clearly specify this, although it did state that Accoona was expecting to "upgrade its American portal and to launch across Europe within 2 months."
(A rather ambiguously phrased statement.)

Regardless, I saw nothing inherent to the search engine to say that it was a bad search. The results I got in my test searches were more or less what I had expected.
Yet, there are grounds for being "anti-Accoona" - thus the creation of sites such as Accoona Sucks. It has little to do with the quality of their search, and a lot to do with some underhanded marketing techniques found on a few forums.

Forum marketing is a scary world, though - the fact is, there are entire companies dedicated to marketing in web forums. I can’t say I approve of this kind of underhanded behavior. A forum is intended as a place where people can present their honest opinions, and can assume that what they are reading is somebody’s honest opinion. To be paid to post on a forum seems a long way away from best practice marketing.

I can’t easily judge what really happened with these forum posts - perhaps Accoona was acting in bad faith, perhaps an employee went overboard. However, on the whole, Accoona is going to get a thumbs down from me - from boredom, if nothing else. The search engine just doesn’t seem to have anything unique to offer. Maybe later.

Although I have no idea what the name might mean, Mojeek does seem to have something interesting to offer the world of search. Although the search engine is currently in a very beta stage of development, it does give indications of some neat ideas to come.

The engine clearly appears to be independent. In fact, it seems to be a single person’s basement project. His name is Marc. That’s really all I can learn - although there’s an article about the search engine at
Pandia, it doesn’t mention anything about the creator. Pandia itself is something I’ve only become aware of due to their information about Mojeek.

So it’s clearly a relatively unknown tool. And, for the time being, justifiably so.
Although the engine seems to have some good ideas, they aren’t yet available in the public beta. The SERP’s are
definitely different than other engines, on the basis of my vanity search test.

One thing I noticed, unfortunately, was that their crawl was at least two months old. Not too cool. It’s great that the engine is running their own spider, but they don’t seem to have the computing power to keep up.

I’m not the only one to have noticed this new search engine - Phil Bradley commented
on it’s basic features a few weeks ago, but had little to say.

The Pandia article gives some additional information concerning Mojeek’s advanced and personal search options. Advanced search bears some similarity to Google’s advanced search page - but is clearly simpler. It’s obvious that Mojeek has the goal of keeping things very clear and easy. One special feature from Mojeek, which I haven’t seen before, is the option to try your search with different algorithms.

Unfortunately, these algorithms are not provided with anything like a descriptive label. You can search using the following algorithms: "default&quot, 1, 2, 3 or 4. Call me unexcited. I can’t readily judge the value of an algorithm’s results if I don’t have any idea what difference is expected - and I don’t really feel like trying to guess. The idea is sound - just a few more words would be great! I did try these alternate searches - and there’s no question that they return different results - I’m just unsure what was being changed.

What really seems valuable is Mojeek’s personal search options. However, these are currently closed to the public - and I haven’t inquired about the beta test. Regardless, the personal search options claim to offer you the ability to customize all ranking parameters, specify your exact choice of searches, share your index, and even retrieve results in XML format.

There’s no indication that Mojeek has any intention of monetizing their service - the search engine proclaims loudly their lack of advertising, but at some point the site
will need to monetize if it’s ever likely to get beyond these currently lackluster results.