Launched yesterday (on February 7) in its test phase, Volunia, the new search engine which is a true hybrid of social network and search engine, brings some fresh air and innovative concepts in the world of on-line search.
Seet & Meek, or a Power User experience feedback in a connected mode.
Let's begin with the most important features of this new search engine.
Visual maps or grid maps
Isometric visual maps ala Sim City are the Google Sitelinks counterpart (the links towards internal pages of a site which are displayed under the main link in the result page). They highlight the main sections of the sites and can also be displayed as grid maps (following the folders, sub-folders and simple sheets representation). Being only simple visual representation, they do not convey any specific information regarding the semantic closeness of the sections and are rather mere gadgets.
Messages
It is possible to share messages about each result returned after a search. Each page thus becomes a place for exchange and discussion, which will help the search engine:
- to better note the results (we immediately think about users' feelings analysis, the notion of social result being part of the project since its inception)
- to follow what is said about a site / a page (the magic union between SEO and SMO, a new data source to follow, but will there be an API to do it automagically?)
Multimedia
The media button enables the search for different medias on the visited web site (images, audio, video, documents, others). So this search is not performed in the whole web (image search as with Google or Bing), but limited to the site being visited.
Plugin
A Firefox plugin is also proposed. It enables the user to crawl in an iframe with Volunia's features still present around it. Quite an inconclusive test to me, as the technology used is a bit outdated, plus only a few sites accept to be visited inside iframes, as it is usually viewed as an appropriation of content. A more classical approach with a toolbar would have surely been less intrusive and more useful.
Concurrent sessions
This test rose an issue a regular user might not bump into as often, which is the concurrent sessions issue. When you connect on two different browsers (say Firefox and Chrome), the first session is interrupted. You will have to log in and log out to benefit from the social features of the search engine, which is a bit of a pity, as this issue does not occur when connected on Google for instance.
Gadgets to put on one's sites
Many gadgets are proposed to put on one's site: integration of the visual map, social buttons (to link to messages about the page), direct display of the messages on the page for connected users), internal search within the site (through a text input field or by media type).
Conclusions
The Volunia search engine includes the social dimension of search in all its user experience, whereas the two main search engines only added it a bit late (Bing now takes into account Facebook data, and Google pushes its own social network, Google+). But where classic search engines are backed with genuine social networks, Volunia chose to create its own from scratch, focusing on the search experience. Will the users join en masse such a network? Nothing is less sure, as the current social networks offer different features and are already well established.
“By the way, is it a search engine or a social network?”, as read in a power user's comment on Volunia's home page.
As webmasters, it is hard not to feel bereft of a content with a real value: the users comments. Whether within the search engine itself, or in the gadget embedded on one's own page, it is impossible to follow up with the messages exchanged about it, nothing said about influencing them. We are de facto community managers with potentially one community to take care of for each page of ours sites. And there is no tool proposed yet to manage such an amount of data, whereas in terms of SEO/SMO, it is essential to us.
Volunia is still in its test phase with a very limited amount of users, and only a few indexed content. However, it shows us the possible evolution of actual search engines (the two market mammoths are surely keeping an eye on its features), and it enables us to better prepare ourselves to possible changes. It is quite similar as Blekko for that matter: not yet big enough to be really useful, but a very good testing ground to play with.
Volunia, un nouveau moteur de recherche (in French)
Volunia, um novo motor de busca (in Portuguese)
Volunia, un nuevo motor de búsqueda (in Spanish)
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