Pressflip is a new search engine which learns your preferences over time to deliver more relevant results. I signed up and tried it a few times. I can definitely see the potential, it worked especially well for niche queries like Humax. I wrote about the concept behind it when it was still Persai and I like that they have released it as a search engine. I said at the time that I don’t think competing with Google is impossible so long as you use a completely different method of indexing and searching the web. Attempting to beat Google at PageRank is clearly a waste of time.
Pressflip’s founders are well known for their antipathy to Web 2.0 generally and social features in particular. This appears to have arisen from the number of terrible sites which lazily plaster on a social networking aspect to attract VC from me-too investors who missed out on facebook and want in on the action. I don’t think scepticism is necessarily a bad thing but you can take it too far. If anything will fell pressflip it will be this attitude.
My advice to them would be to ignore everything that happened on the web since 2003 and take a fresh look at the basic concept of building a network of users and the advantages it can bring. Pressflip relies on the user telling it what links are relevant, by doing this it builds up a picture of what I don’t want to see. Positive feedback is generated by clicking the links served – this was something I didn’t get initially so it may help to explain this somewhere to time pressed Internet users such as myself.
Networks matter
They need to apply the concept to other users. There may be someone else of a similar mind to me and I want to see their links served alongside mine. In the same way I could flip a user I didn’t like so Pressflip could learn who I approve of. Doing that would leverage all the work being done by the users flipping article and release them from the individual silos Pressflip currently traps people in. I originally wrote about the concept in relation to delicious:
The beauty of delicious is that it can look into the mind of other people with similar interests to me, see what they have tagged and return more relevant results. Another advantage it has over Google is that delicious can also assess the strength of a link between me and another user by seeing how many times we have tagged the same page with the same tag.
All Yahoo has to do is analyse these links between users in the same way Google analyses links between pages and it will have a search engine which thinks differently and gives people a real reason to use Yahoo search over Google.
Do this and you win. Don’t do it and, well we all know what Uncov’s favourite word was.
