Category Archives: Search Engine Reviews

Ask Jeeves

SUMMARY
Type of engine:Major search engine.
Relevancy of results:Good for web search.
Features and functionality: Ask offers a lot of features these days, and I think they are good ones.
Quality of help and “about us” pages: Very good. The help pages cover many topics and are easy to understand.
Business model: Sponsored results from Google’s AdSense on ask.com and through distribution to other sites owned by Jeeves, such as iWon and Excite. Here’s a full list of Ask’s properties.

INTRO
Just like the major TV networks, there are now four major search engines: Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves*. Ask Jeeves? That’s right. With the acquisition and integration of Teoma’s technology, Ask Jeeves has snuck into the top tier. I used to think of them only as a natural language engine that provided mediocre relevance, but things have changed. When was the last time you used Ask? If you’re like me, it’s probably been a while. These days, Ask offers a variety of search features including their own web index search, local search, desktop search, and more.

*This is not intended to slight any of the other high-quality search engines out there. I’m just referring in this case to deep pockets and large audiences.

Check out their Smart Search page to see all the different things the company is up to, including local search, a toolbar, and a host of other things. None of their extra features are amazing and completely different from what other engines are doing, but they’ve done a nice job bundling it all together and the help pages do a nice job of explaining it all.

Advanced Search offers some nice features such as limiting searches to title or URL. In the information retrieval world, limiting searches to fields is core. But it has not taken off so much for web search engines. Yahoo also offers field filters, but Google and MSN do not.

Features
The user preferences page offers a couple features you may want to adjust before searching on Ask. You can set your default location for local search, set the number of results per page up to 100, and you can also uncheck the option for keeping frames on when you click on a search result and leave Ask.com. I hate it when search engines trap me in their frames after I’ve clicked on a site, but maybe other people feel differently since frames are set as the default.
Some other things to point out is that search results have cached, or archived, versions. This is very nice for pages that have gone dead or are temporarily down, but you still want access to their content.

Right now they’re pushing My Jeeves, the personalized version of their services. (Note: they very clearly state that it is still in beta.) Unlike the previous generation of personalization services like stocks, email, news, and so forth, offered by the portals, and still in effect at places like MSN, Yahoo, and AOL, My Ask is focused on personalizing search. My Ask offers the ability to save and organize searches. Users can even add notes to their saved searches. This is similar to what other sites like Furl, Net Snippets and other companies are doing. But with the added advantage of being a search engine, Ask can offer a more fully integrated search and save option.

To see what queries are popular, Ask provides Jeeves IQ. Unfortunately it only shows a few topics, such as news searches and biggest gainers, and they only show the top 5 or 10 queries per topic. I wish they would expand this. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that a few years ago they published much more about their query stream.

Jeeves also has kids search that has a focus on school subjects like history, science, and math help.

Query Examples
I searched for peanut peanut butter cookie recipe. One of the first things I noticed were the related topics that appear on the right hand side of the page. There were suggested topics such as peanut butter cookies, make peanut butter cookies, free peanut butter cookie recipe, and so forth. None of these refined my query enough to make me rethink my search strategy, but each of them did provide a slightly different tactic with different results. Every time you click on a related topic, new related topics are generated. This is nice because it doesn’t keep you in an infinite loop and you can travel through gradual steps to different topics. My big suggestion here is for Ask to think of a way to mark the path I have traveled. As I kept clicking through related topics and reviewing search results I lost track of what I had clicked on. Maybe there could be a running list that is kept off to the side of the page that shows what I have already looked at, or some other visual mapping clue to help me remember my way.

By changing my search ever so slightly and making cookie into cookies, peanut butter cookies recipe I got totally different related topics and almost entirely different web results. On the first page of results, only one site was returned for both queries. Something seems a bit fishy about their truncations because those two searches should provide nearly identical results; or if not nearly identical, then at least there should be a significant overlap in the result sets.

But OK, so the results are different, but let’s take a look at the relevancy. This is a pretty easy search topic and all the results are relevant in that they have peanut butter cookie recipes on them. Time to try something a bit harder: peanut butter cookie recipes for diabetics. The first thing that stands out, and is not good, is that Ask went from 3 sponsored results to 11. Eleven! I had to scroll below the fold, and then some, just to get to my first web result. That’s bad. So bad that if I were a regular user searching on Ask for diabetic recipes I would leave. But since I’m here, it’s worth checking out the sponsored results. None of them, not a one, are relevant. Two are recipe sites that have regular, non-diabetic cookie recipes and the rest are diabetes sites that do not have peanut butter cookie recipes. None of them have a peanut butter cookie recipe for diabetics. This is an obvious case of the sponsored results matching to one word – in this case diabetes – and providing nine false positive matches. Flipping over to Google I see the same sites with the same display text being shown in their sponsored links section. It seems the relevancy is Google’s problem and the number of results being shown is Ask’s problem.

The relevancy of the web results was pretty good with one exception: there were two sites that were selling a diabetes dietary supplement, but had links to other sites with peanut butter cookie recipes. This is a tough thing for engines to catch because the site provides enough content and link text to match the query, but the goal of these sites is to sell their products. There was also one site with a diabetes recipe for frozen peanut butter mocha parfaits that had as an ingredient vanilla wafer cookie crumbs. So I can understand why it was returned, but it really is not relevant. Also, it is worth noting that the only related topic that came up is sugar free peanut butter cookies. Why did we go from 10 related topics to 1? There should be many related topics for my search, such as other diabetic cookie recipes.

Seeing as how Ask has been known as being a natural language engine, I searched for how many calories do diabetic peanut butter cookies have? The first result, above even the sponsored listings, is a red rectangle with another search box in it that says: Find the nutritional content of… But I also searched for just the word calories and I got the same box. It is not natural language, but it is a hard-coded result based on word matching. I also tried what is the population of Scotland? but there were no natural language type of results returned.

Ask also offers tabs for pictures, news, local, and products, but those reviews will have to wait for another time.

I also want to point out that Ask returns content for some queries. Like for San Francisco weather the current temperature and 7 day forecast are displayed as if they were the first result. Their help section has more info about what they are calling smart search. Other examples are people searches and the now ubiquitous stock searches.

CONCLUSION
Somewhere along the line Ask Jeeves went from a natural language engine to an all around engine. Obviously Teoma was the major factor in their evolution, but I was surprised to see how little placement natural language searches are getting now on their site. Their relevance and features are respectable and deserve more attention from the search industry. I also think they have the nice advantage of being less under the microscope than Google, Yahoo, or MSN, and as such they take more risks without incurring the wraith of the media and the search industry.

Ice Rocket

SUMMARY
Type of engine: Tabs for news, blogs, phone pics, images, and personals.
Relevancy of results: Web results come from Alexa, so I will save that review for another time. Other results, like news and image search, comes from other sources.
Features and functionality: Average. Pretty straightforward.
Quality of help and "about us" pages: Needs Improvement.
There really are no help or about us pages, but that is supposed to be remedied. As Blake Rhodes stated in his Search Lounge interview, "Yes we will have help pages in all sections soon. "
Business model: Sponsored listings. Though they only show one paid listing per query which really helps with their perceived relevance.

INTRO
Icerocket is a new search engine from Dallas, Texas that has the unique goal of being responsive to users. Blake Rhodes, the CEO, maintains a useful blog about the engine and to understand his philosophy about responsiveness this is a good post to read: http://blog.icerocket.com/node/view/14.
He writes, "When people write me with suggestions, what do I do? I LISTEN to them!! Without our users, we are nothing. As you can see, we have made several changes to the site based on the emails we have received." For more information about Icerocket, be sure to check out the Search Lounge interview, with Blake. Icerocket also differentiates itself by promoting two tabs that I haven’t seen at other engines: Phone Pics and Find a Friend. You be the judge if those are useful options or not.
And I should mention that Mark Cuban, the tech entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is an investor. If nothing else, that fact helps to bring some extra attention to the company.

REVIEW
There are search tabs for:
Web - searches Alexa.com. Blake stated in our interview, "We actually don’t pull Alexa’s results, just the thumbnail images and the traffic numbers. We crawl and index a lot of it ourselves". I have to admit that I can hardly tell the difference. For most of the queries I tried the results seemed to be exactly the same on Alexa and Icerocket. However, for the query Elizabeth Edwards breast cancer, there was the slightest variation in that positions 3, 4, and 5 switched places, but both orderings were equally good. I found a couple other queries with slight changes in ordering, but nothing significant. Rather than review Alexa’s relevancy, I will save that for another article. In terms of Icerocket’s interface, thumbnail snapshots, a la Alexa, are displayed next to each result and there is also a "quick view" option to peek without leaving Icerocket. There is also an "archive" link next to each result that takes you to the Wayback Machine. As I’ve said before, I’m happy any time I see the Internet Archive being used.

Blogs – this is great to see as a choice and I am sure this option will begin to crop up more and more. Blog searches default to "by date", and you sometimes don’t get any hits. I searched for san diego mayoral race and got zero results. When I chose "sort by relevance", I got 10 results, which seems to be the max. You might think that only the very latest results should be returned in a blog search, and for the most part I agree. However, in the sorted by relevance option the posts ranged from 7 hours to a day and a half ago, and that’s still pretty recent. The sorting by relevance is misleading, because all the results were actually sorted by date. Let me clarify: sort by date returned no results. Sort by relevance returned 10 results but they were actually sorted by date. In terms of relevancy, the results were good. Only two of the results were not relevant, and that’s because one was a political blog that mentioned San Diego and the Los Angeles mayor’s race, but was not about the San Diego race. The other result that wasn’t so good was a blog that only posts links to the titles of news stories, so yeah I guess the link was relevant, but the blog itself provided no context.

For another test query, I checked on Yahoo news to see what the lead story was. I grabbed the phrase Saudi attack and plugged it in and sorted by date. The most recent one was "-10037 minute ago", almost as if I was searching faster than time itself! And changing it to sort by relevance returned the exact same results. The results were peculiar. The first result was from Outside the Beltway, OK, that’s good. But the eight other results all seemed to be from the same source, only titled slightly differently. Most were called "Saudi Arabia News .Net - Newspapers on the Net", but there was also "Cairo News .Net - Newspapers on the Net" and "Manila News .Net - Newspapers on the Net", and all the pages were formatted and branded similarly. The articles were all indeed unique, but it raises a couple of points. First of all, should de-duplication occur at the source level so that the user can get a broad range of sources? And if so, how can an engine recognize that these sites are all from the same source? It’s not easy. Also, are these really blog results? They seem more like news results to me.

This is all just a longwinded way of saying it’s great they’re searching blogs, but some advanced features might save the day and make it more useful. And definitely the sort by relevance needs to really be sorting by relevance.

News – n/a. I tried my Saudi attack query, but got no results. San Francisco hotel strike also got no results. It seems the news search must be temporarily down. (Note: I tried it several times on 12/16 and 12/17, all with no luck.)

Phone Pics – this is a feature I haven’t seen on any other engine. I tried a search for Howard Dean and got 10 results, some of which were very relevant, while others were somewhat relevant. The difference being that the very relevant were photos of Dean, while the somewhat relevant were correct in context, but weren’t actually photos of him. For example, there was a photo of a Dean banner. The results are coming from Textamerica with the same exact results being shown in both places. Phone Pics is a nifty thing to play around with, but I’m not sure it deserves a tab at the same level as web, news, etc.

Images – a meta search engine for images. Icerocket aggregates results from a variety of sources. Right below each result it says where the result was grabbed from, such as Webshots, Picsearch, etc. Howard Dean returns 106 results, all of which are relevant. Of course that’s an easy query, but I don’t want to spend too much time on image search. I’ll quote Blake from his Blog: "If you look at our image search, I think you’ll find some images you won’t see on the other engines". I’m guessing he means the combination of meta-results is unique even though each individual result comes from another engine.

Find a Friend - a meta search engine for personals. I have never seen this on a search engine before. It searches from multiple databases based on the criteria you enter, such as desired and age and location. I guess this is a cool feature, but similar to Phone Pics I’m not convinced it’s on the same tier as web search. And it should probably be called personals search.

For other features, Icerocket has an RSS Builder which lets you add RSS feeds to your web site. There is an Advanced Search, but the options are fairly basic. Hopefully they’ll build that up a bit more. There is a Toolbar, which includes an option for Firefox users like myself. And Ice Spy, which shows what other users are searching for.

As I mentioned, Icerocket only displays one sponsored result, and for every query I tried it was a small link titled "Free ipod! ". On the one hand it’s too bad they’re not targeting the ads to my query, but on the other, and probably bigger hand, it’s nice to only have one very small link instead of the three to five common on other engines. And, what’s even more noteworthy is that they are leaving nearly all of the right hand side of their web results’ pages empty. Empty! Can you imagine empty real estate on a search engine these days? It’s like a big gaping hole that’s just waiting for AdWords to slip right in. I really like that they haven’t done that, but I won’t fault them if they do end up doing it. After all, they need to make money.

I hope that for each tab they put up some information about where the results are coming from, particularly since transparency goes along with Icerocket’s goals of being responsive.

CONCLUSION
In my opinion the most compelling thing Icerocket is offering is its Blog search, although I never did figure out for sure if they’re powering it themselves or not. Other interesting things that Icerocket offers are the tabs for searching phone pics and for searching personal ads. I haven’t seen these two filters called out by other search engines, but maybe there’s a reason for that. I hope in the future they make web search more distinctive and unique. Even if they don’t get to the point of doing their own web crawl, they can distinguish themselves by customizing Alexa’s results, customizing their interface, or mixing in results from other engines.

Blingo

-This “review” is my way of helping Search Lounge readers win free prizes. The review is definitely on the light side. Good luck. In fact, don’t even read this review, just go to Blingo and win yourself a prize-

Type of engine: Sweepstakes, oh and general web search.
Overall: Put it this way: it’s all about winning the prizes. It’s not that the search is bad, but the results are directly from Gigablast so I don’t know that it’s worthwhile rating Blingo’s relevancy. As far as I could tell there’s no difference at all from the Gigablast results.

SUMMARY
Relevancy of results: Same as Gigablast, and I need to do a review of them.
Features and functionality: Average. There’s not much to it other than a search box and pictures of the prizes you can win.
Quality of help and “about us” pages: The “about us” pages are all about winning prizes. I couldn’t find anything search related.
Business model: Lure users in with free prizes, and then show them Google ads.

INTRO
Blingo just released a press release today so I thought I’d be right on top of things by doing a brief review for the Lounge. Blingo uses Gigablast’s results so I won’t spend too much time evaluating the relevancy. That’s best left to a Gigablast review.

The prizes are a one year Netflix subscription, a digital camera, a digital video recorder, an iPod, a $250 Amazon gift certificate, movie passes, and a Sony music gift certificate. Just go to their site, start searching, and hope you’re one of the random winners. (I hope I win an iPod.)

UI & FEATURES
No registration is required unless you win something. So you can just go to Blingo and search. That’s different, if I remember correctly, from iWon, where you had to register. They provide “see also” links that are taken from Gigablast and formatted differently. And there’s a “did you mean” suggestion taken directly from Gigablast.

QUERY EXAMPLES
I searched for Oakland public library and there were four Google ads that went more than halfway down the page. I tried coniferous trees of North America and got the same thing. And both of those queries are non-commercial in my book. But it’s not exactly surprising for a site like this. I should say that the results for both of these queries were good enough that it’s not a waste of time to search on Blingo.

CONCLUSION
If you like Gigablast, you might as well use Blingo. Same results, and you can win prizes. So stop reading this and go win a prize.

Exalead
Type of engine: General web search with integrated browsing capability.
Overall: Average.*
If this engine were a drink it would be…a French Kiss. It’s French, it has lots of ingredients, and if you take your time with it, it’ll get you where you need to go.

SUMMARY
Relevancy of results: Average.
*There are good sites in there, sometimes you just have to click around too much to find them. This score is what brings their overall rating down.
Freshness of results: Very good.
I was impressed. Of course I’ll need to check back over time since they just went live and so I assume the index was created recently. They advertise real-time indexing, but I’m assuming (though I don’t know) that it’s just for a targeted subset like news articles.
Breadth of results: Very good.
Not only is the breadth good, but the related terms and categories provide good access points.
Features and functionality: Very good.
Quality of help and “about us” pages: Very good.
Includes keyboard shortcuts and explanations of special features like phonetic search, which I’ll discuss a bit more of later.
Business model: Exalead makes its money by selling enterprise search. The web version of their search is a showcase for their technology. As far as I could tell there were no sponsored links.

INTRO
Exalead is a French company that has been around since 2000, but just recently went live with a beta web search product. Their main line of business in enterprise search, but their web search is a nice way to attract attention. Although I’d heard about them, I hadn’t used Exalead until this review.

They claim they have indexed one billion pages and have plans to increase the size. And hey, a billion pages isn’t too shabby a starting point.

UI & FEATURES
The front door is very sleek and minimalist with its aqua-marine and silvery gray colors, but do a search and you’ll be presented with a lot of information. Although it is a lot of info, it’s very well organized and you’ll be getting around Exalead like a pro in no time. They do a nice job of keeping focused on the site results in the main, central column of the page. The ancillary, though still very useful, stuff is to the left and right sides. Let’s take a walk through it all…

Thumbnails appears on the right side, next to the sites. I’m on a laptop so the images are pretty small, but on a larger monitor I’m pretty sure they’d be clearly visible. Thumbnail images are getting more popular and I think they do have value. However, going back to A9, I’d like to see more engines adopting an easily customizable interface so that I can include or exclude extras like thumbnails. If you click on the thumbnail it loads the site in the bottom half of the search result page. A nice feature is that the search terms you entered will be highlighted on the page. You can also bookmark the result to access it again the next time you’re using Exalead. This is a feature some of the big engines are using, but I’m not a convert yet. Between my browser’s bookmarks, my C drive, my RSS reader, and the online bookmark program I use, I’m not sure I need another set of bookmarks on a search engine. But who knows, maybe someday I’ll be convinced that I want to save at the search level.

Moving to the left side of the page, there are several things to see. For related terms, you can click on the square next to the related terms and it’ll cross the term out. Nice way to track movement, especially for someone like me who is constantly refining queries and trying different things. It gets confusing to remember what I’ve already done. As far as I could tell, the related terms refines within results rather than sending out a brand new query.

Related categories pull relevant ODP categories. And Exalead also is displaying the bread crumb trail beneath each site result when it’s available. Thank you! I’ll never understand why the major engines moved away from doing that. There are several excellent web directories and if you map results to a directory it can only help users. The naysayers love to say that only 5% of people browse, but that’s misleading because a) people don’t browse if the interface isn’t done well, as it is with Exalead; b) for those of us who do browse it is extremely valuable; c) let’s run the numbers. Let’s pick a number that represents how many English speakers search the internet each day. How about 250 million? If 5% of those people browse that means that 12.5 million people browse. Obviously I’m making these numbers up, but you get the point. The number of people who like to browse categories is still in the millions, and that’s even with category browse not being promoted by Google.

Getting back to the features, you can limit results to audio or video. Very nice because a direct link to the file itself is actually returned so you don’t have to click to the page and then have to find the file on the page. This is conceptually similar, though implemented differently, to what BrainBoost does when they “snap open” to the section of the page that is relevant. I like this direct targeting of information and getting users as close to their goal as possible.

Exalead’s Advanced search is quite nice. You can limit by country, language, file format, title, and date. In the search method field there are some interesting choices: automatic word stemming, phonetic search, and approximate spelling. You can also set these on the preferences page.

QUERY EXAMPLES
I wanted to start with a relatively easy query, just to get a feel for Exalead’s interface: wes anderson. The results were all very relevant, but like I said, this is a give-me query. I like the way the results page looks. There’s a lot to see, but it’s easy to understand. If you click on the folder icon it will open a new page with results just from that site; sub-pages, in other words. The related terms were good, things like names of actors who have been in Anderson’s movies, other director’s names, and movies that are similar to Anderson’s films, like I Heart Huckabees. The related categories had Rushmore and the Royal Tenenbaums. It also had Indiana Sports and Recreation, which wasn’t relevant to me.

I played around with the phonetic search for wess andersen, but all the results on the first page included the words wess andersen, and didn’t deviate from the way I spelled it. I also tried wess andersen with the approximate spelling search method. This did return some sites with the term wes, but no variations on andersen. I’m not sure how they’re building their phonetic search algorithm, but it’s a nice feature to have for those occasional things, like names, that you know how to pronounce but not spell. I also tried to search with the phonetic search for information about the German soccer player Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, pretending I didn’t know how to spell his name. I tried karl heinz rumineger, karl heinz ruminiger, and karl heinz rumminiger, but got zero results for any of them. Not so good.

Let’s move on to a query that’s a bit tougher: 2004 world series winner returned NPR.org as the first result. Probably when Exalead did their last crawl the NPR homepage had news about the World Series. The other results on page one weren’t so good. I can tell why each of them were returned, but none of them were about the Red Sox’ win. There was a site about the Little League World Series, one about the Poker World Series, and then a few, like the World Conservation Union, that were not relevant at all. However, all is not lost. Lurking there on the left side of the page was a list of related terms that looked helpful. I clicked on the first one, series winner, and a bunch more sites about poker were returned, plus a couple of other random topics. But no MLB. The next related term, world series winner, did better for me. The first result was an article about Manny Ramirez winning the MVP. The results could have been better for this query.

To refine my query, I wanted to try out some Boolean logic. I entered: 2004 world series winner NOT “little league” NOT poker. And indeed I didn’t get anything about poker or little league. However, the World Conservation Union’s site was not only still there, but it got bumped up in the results. I played around with the related terms and the related categories, but the results just weren’t quite right. The categories were too general, like Recreation and Sports, and the terms looked good but didn’t return good sites.

CONCLUSION
I am really excited to see a new web search engine that not only incorporates, but actually highlights, the categories from a web directory. That alone is enough to keep me coming back. But since not everyone is a devout directory user, there are several other nice and useful features on Exalead. The phonetic search is nice to see applied to a web index, even though it wasn’t really working so well for me. Also, being able to limit to audio or video files is helpful. Their interface is unique in that it offers several ways to get to results, such as thumbnails, previews, etc. Although most of these features are available in one form or another on other engines, Exalead has done a fine job of combining and bringing all these different elements together. Plus they’re searching their own web index.

I hope they put some effort into improving relevance, because that’s the missing ingredient here. With their own index, their unique interface, and their wide-ranging selection of advanced features, Exalead has huge potential.

Wondir
Type of Engine: Question and answer.
Overall: Average.
If this engine were a drink it would be…a shot of Jagermeister. Your first time it’s a bit scary, but fascinating nonetheless, and you don’t really know what the heck it is. But have a drink and you’ll enjoy it for novelty’s sake as well as alcoholic (informational) content.

Intro
To put it simply, Wondir is a collection of questions and answers. There are several search related services, as in non-traditional engines, that I keep reading about on blogs and elsewhere. One of them is Wondir, so I decided it’s time to check them out.

On Wondir, anyone can ask and anyone can answer questions. It’s a community-based model that connects those who know with those who want to know. Google Answers is a similar service, and there were several others in the past including LookSmart Live. But all parts of Wondir are free to everyone and their revenue comes from Google AdWords. (For those of you not familiar with this free way of getting answers to questions, there is also an institution in your town called the public library that is free and you can – for the most part – trust the answers you get there. Or try accessing librarians remotely at AskNow. Check it out, it’s a fantastic service.) Wondir also distributes its question and answer box to vertical, specialty sites. I like that idea because if you go to ichef.com you’ll see what looks like an ichef question and answer box. However, when you ask a question it takes you right to Wondir. This is a good way for Wondir’s positive strengths to be accessed by people who otherwise wouldn’t go to the Wondir.com site.

Warning, prediction ahead:
As an aside, I predict several things that we think of as different are all going to merge: email, RSS, online bookmarking tools, article databases, web directories, and search engines. The line is already blurring, but consider a technology that is neutral in that it doesn’t care where information comes from so long as it’s relevant. So, like RSS but broader, I can subscribe to the content I want while remaining source neutral. But let’s get crazy and add email into the equation. Right now email is delivered and sorted by sender, date, subject, and a few other flags. But why not deliver and sort it by content so that all emails, blog posts, newly indexed articles, and so forth are filtered by topic. Within a couple years people (or at least this person) will not be using Outlook or web-based email the way we think of it now; I’ll be using some kind of reader that aggregates search results, news feeds, email, and who knows what else into one uber-reader. Think of federated search, but with the added advantage that instead of searching in the past on content that has been crawled, indexed, and stored, we’ll be fed in real-time with relevant content from newly published sources like blogs, news, and email.
Back on topic….

UI & Features
Wondir is confusing at first. Not confusing like What is outside the universe? (think about it!), but confusing in that it takes you a few moments to orient yourself. However, you can’t go wrong these days by using the big rectangular “search” box in the middle. I put search in quotes because really it’s an Ask box in this case. But just like a search, you enter your question and then things start happening.

The whole system is very transparent, everything is public, which is probably why it’s confusing at first since there’s so much to see. For instance, the Wondir Question Ticker lets you see what other users are asking and the Question Board shows a chronological list of questions. You can also sort by answered questions or unanswered questions. You can jump to a different day or go to a subject category to see questions by high-level subject such as Games, Travel, Mature Content, etc.

Just like RSS feeds, you can subscribe to be notified when a word or a phrase appears in a question or answer. You can also get answers by IM. Both of those require registration, but you can stay unregistered and click back to the date you entered your question and see if it’s been answered yet or not. Registering really makes a difference though, and any serious users of Wondir should register right away to take advantage of features. Otherwise you’ll be clicking through long lists of questions trying to find ones you’ve asked to see if anyone has answered them yet.

Query Examples
(Query in this case meaning questions.)
I asked, How do you tie a necktie?
I got the response: Your question will be placed in Home Improvement unless you select a different category for it.
I decided my question was really more of a “How-To” and moved it to that category.

But Wondir also returns results from news articles, search engines, and news groups. For search engines, there were five results. Three were relevant from AlltheWeb, and two were not relevant from About. That’s good relevance, but for now I’m testing Wondir’s question and answer service so won’t linger on web results. It turned out someone had asked a similar question to mine already, so there were already answers. Here’s one of them: there is more than one way, why not try, tie rack.com. Well, that seems a reasonable answer, doesn’t it? Unfortunately your intrepid investigator, never willing to stop in my quest to find the truth, was unable to find a site called tie rack.com. There’s a tie-rack.co.uk, but it’s not helpful. Too bad.

I tried a second question: who is the strongest US chess player right now? There weren’t any similar questions already asked, but I was taken to a page with questions about Bobby Fischer, the strongest chess player in US history. Right after I asked the question, it showed up on the question board. I also saw it scroll by on the Wondir question ticker right away. I got an answer in 14 minutes, unfortunately the answer was “Robert.” Some joker trying to be funny. Do you see me laughing? I waited a couple hours but no one supplied a real answer to my question. (Update, I checked back the following day and still no answer.)

There are many useful and legitimate questions. I saw ones about child custody issues, recipes, pregnancy, etc. But it probably comes as no surprise that there are also many nonsensical and silly questions. Here’s a sampling, just for fun:

Question: what can i do about my puppy who just ate 5 snicker chocolate bars????
Answer: report your self to the animal patrol f*#!%r
Answer: …You’re a dumb and unfit dog carer, I’m afraid.

Question: my best friend and i really like each other but we’re taking things slow but he likes another girl and she also likes him. we want to be together but alot of people are in our way. what should i do?

Question: how do you know when to give up the one you love

Question: What is 1 plus 1?
Answer: 6
Answer: Your I.Q.

And so forth….

Conclusion
The interface is confusing at first, but if you spend a bit of time on Wondir it becomes easier to get around. I like the transparency of the service in that every communication is public, but I’d like to see Wondir make navigation a bit easier. There should be easier ways to view the questions and answers that have already been posted. You can get tricky with things like subscribing to terms, but sometimes you just want to cruise around and look for questions and answers about something without subscribing to it. How about a plain old search box for searching all questions and answers?

To me Wondir is a representational example of the Internet in general: it’s communal, meaning you can be connected to people with similar interests, as well as people who have no authority or business answering questions; it’s got a lot of great content, but it’s also got a lot of crap, and sorting through it is the hardest part; and it’s interesting at first, but the real issue is figuring out how useful it is to you.

For now, Wondir is a novelty item to me, but in the future maybe I’ll incorporate their content into my RSS feeds so I can be notified when topics I’m interested are asked about. But I would like to add that there were tons of questions coming in, and tons of answers too, so it seems that there are people who really find this service valuable. Even if it’s not valuable to you, it is worth playing around with.