On Pressflip

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.

On mainstream users

Apart from my co-founders and I, none of my friends are technical. Technically I’m non-technical too, the only programming language I ever started to learn was html and I gave up fairly quickly. While this is a disadvantage for a founder in that I can’t program anything myself it also means I don’t have the curse of knowledge. I have more of an idea of how a mainstream user sees the Internet.

For example, here is a complete list of technology companies people have heard of:

Microsoft
Yahoo
eBay
PayPal
Napster
Google
YouTube
Skype
Apple
Nintendo
Sony

And here is a comprehensive list of technology company founders people have heard of:

Bill Gates

I was having a conversation with a friend and when I mentioned Steve Jobs, my friend asked who he was. This person has two iPods and a general interest in technology but he still had no idea who Jobs was. It surprised me because I see him as one of the most famous people in the world. But then I’m into tech.

It made me realise what mainstream users care about is having products that are easy to use and that work. So the iPod is famous but the man behind it isn’t. What got me thinking about this topic was finding out more about Persai and realising it relied on RSS. I don’t have any stats but I guess the percentage of people using RSS is minuscule. I installed it for a while and it just wasn’t any use to me. Either I search for stories on Google news or I go straight to the blogs I like.

I had the impression that Persai was some kind of browser plug-in which could track likes and dislikes to serve more relevant results than Google. The fact that it is built on top of RSS severely limits its potential adoption. I assume they have plans to take it beyond RSS but if not I smell trouble.

On Persai

I’m not one of those people who thinks any new startup in search is bound to be beaten by Google. It can’t be done by playing Google at their own game but it can be done by using a different approach. Search startup Persai falls into that category. What struck me was this description from co-founder Ted Dziuba:

We want to build machine programs that can learn things from information that’s out there on the web. In the first application we’ll come out with, you tell us things that you’re interested in, and we’ll continuously go out and find stuff on the internet that’s related to that. There’s a positive feedback loop where you tell us what you like and don’t, so the machine gets progressively better in learning what you like.

I like the basic idea but there is one problem: I don’t really want to tell yet another site what I’m interested in. I’ve told delicious and Digg what links I like. I’ve told facebook what films and books I like. Why should I tell Persai all over again? If Persai could work out a way to yank all this stuff from the other sites automatically and knit it altogether then serve relevant results that would be a fantastic tool, unfortunately:

Recommendations are based entirely on content, other users’ feedback has no bearing on what Persai recommends to you.

This is a mistake. I’ve said before the key to next generation search is analysing the links between users as well as Google analyses the links between pages. Persai seems to have it half right in that I can tell it what I like but I think they need to rethink their approach on other users’ contributions.

There are a few startups looking to revolutionise search for a second time. I met the founders of another new search engine Piins a few weeks ago, they are still in private beta so I can’t go into specifics but they also have a very interesting concept which has a good chance of success. Both Persai and Piins come into the “companies I would definitely invest in” category, if I were a VC.