Sproose: Real Social Search

• Posted by B Jones on October 21st, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

I just tried out Sproose.com, a new search engine with “User Improved Results”. The first thing I did (and the first thing I usually do to test out a new search engine) was to enter my name to see how relevant the results were.

I typed in “Badi Jones”, and other than the fact that my personal site came up first (good job), I noticed that there were a relatively small number of results:
1 - 10 of about 1384 results found

Compare that number with 298,000 results from Google, 780,000 from Yahoo, and 100,000 from MSN, and it’s obvious that Sproose isn’t in the “Bigest index” competition.

Results look relevant enough, and I’m curious how they are getting them.

The next thing I noticed was the little Digg-like voting boxes that we are all probably (or should be) familiar with by now. If by chance you aren’t, the idea is that if you like one of the results, you can give it your vote. The more votes a listing receives, the higher its position will be. On that same note, if a result comes up that you really don’t care for, you can click the “bury” to remove a listing from your index, and I assume give overall negative points.

So I did another search, this time for “SEO Tools Pagerank” just to see if seologs.com was anywhere to be seen. It came up in the number 4 position. So I click the “I Like It” link to vote up my site. I was able to vote for my site, and it moved to the #1 position, but a notice came up saying that my vote would only affect my searches, and if I wanted my vote to “Count” and affect results for everyone, I would have to register and log in.

I logged in from a different browser so I could start fresh, and I did the same search for “SEO Tools Pagerank”. Sure enough, seologs was back down to #4. This time when I voted, I noticed that the listing’s vote count changed, and it looked like my vote counted. The SEOlogs.com result moved to the #1 position.

The one last thing to do was to check in a 3rd browser with no cookies to see if my vote made any difference to all users. I searched a 3rd time “SEO Tools Pagerank” in the 3rd browser, and there was the SEOlogs listing, right in the #1 position.

I would imagine that if someone else logged in and voted for the #2 or #3 result, it would probably bypass my listing, since they initially ranked higher than seologs.com, but I didn’t try that.

Sproose also has a video search, which I also tried, and found to be somewhat lacking in results. I did a search for “Shoemoney” and only got back 13 results, where Google returns about 80 results. Looks like they only get videos from blinkx.com, which is definitely limiting.

If you want to promote your site in Sproose, they offer a javascript voting widget that you can put in your pages, that allows visitors to cast votes directly from your site.

Overall, I think Sproose has done a good job mixing Social bookmarking with Search. Add to all this the ability to tag and comment on results, and what you have is a real, Web 2.0 “Social Search Engine”.

This has been a paid review of a good product.