Yoono CEO Pascal Josselin has announced the public beta release of a new Web clipping feature called Buzz it! – available as a plugin for FireFox (it can also be download in Internet Explorer). Yoono has consistently appeared in The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines (ASE) list on Read/WriteWeb. Actually, there are several members of the “Top 100” club that relate in various ways to what is commonly known as “Social Search.”
The initial assumption is that while using a search engine to surf the Internet, a user (or “yooser” in Yoono speak) will naturally come upon material that is so wonderful that they want to save it for themselves to return to later, and most likely share with their friends as well. The first step is to click on the “favorites” tab in IE, or the “bookmarks” tab in FireFox and add it to your own personal collection of special sites. But now what? In prehistoric times, we would a) copy the URL, b) open our email, then c) paste the URL into an email and send it to our friends with a quick subject line like, “Check this out!!” Of course, if the site was any good, our friends would then save it in their favorites, and the whole process would begin again.
That is so 2006! For starters, “Top 100” entrant bookmach will take over as soon as you bookmark (or “bookmach” in their lingo) the site. Bookmach will continue to search through their index of over 3,000 blogs in order to continuously look for updates to your topic. And if it’s the continuous search feature that you find most appealing, check out Top 100 alt search engines allth.at allth.at or Swamii. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, these ASE will keeping searching for you long after you’ve logged off.
The Wisdom of the Crowd
But let’s say that you found a really fantastic site, and you want other searchers to benefit from your discovery. Social Search engines such as Collarity and Searchles believe in sharing your best discoveries with others, so that the whole community benefits from each other’s collective wisdom, and each person doesn’t have to start from scratch when another member has already done most of the work. And in the case of Yoono, there are over 600,000 “yoosers” who have shared more than 70 million personal bookmarks! And with Yoono, you only share the personal favorites that you select.
Voting Search Engines
One particular way of communicating the quality of a site to the other members of the search community is by “voting” on the site, and several of the Top 100 alts have some type of voting feature. After reviewing a web page, you can give it a virtual thumbs up or down vote. That feedback is then incorporated back into the index, so that quality sites rise in the search results, and poor ones drop out. Search Engine of the Month – April, AfterVote does exactly that, as well as Omgili, Sproose, and URL.com. With Yoono, the fact that another yooser has bookmarked the page is interpreted as a vote for that page.
Conclusion
And now we come back to Yoono’s latest innovation. With Yoono’s new Buzz it! feature, you don’t have forward an entire website or even a whole page to your buddies; with Buzz it! you can easily clip various sections of different pages, including videos, images, and links; add comments, and email the mashed up result directly to your friends. In fact, you can even post your results directly to your blog! I tried this one, and it worked like a charm. This is the new start-of-the-art in Social Search; the ability to collect and customize a variety of elements and share them in one convenient application. Yonoo naturally has it’s own toolbar (and sidebar), both with several additional features. To get the most out of these extras, there is an explanatory video, a 17 page help section, and a detailed FAQ page. Well, now Yonoo; check it out today!
