Bill Gross's New Search Engine: Snap
As Andy Beal explains at Search Engine Lowdown, Bill Gross announced at Web 2.0 his new search engine, called Snap. Snap is designed to make better results by working with searchers to refine queries. It helps you refine your search as you do it, and it has access to the feeds from ISPs, seeing where searchers go after they complete searching. The data is supposed to be anonymous (and it better be), and it represents some nice forward thinking. I've always believed that the best answer from a search engine is the one the searcher is looking for, never what the algorithm thinks is the most popular page. By seeing where you go, Snap will know for all searchers where to direct them next time.

Snap also makes statistics completely available to the public. This fosters a lot of trust, and is enormously interesting. Snap's popularity meters may very well be the most popular feature on the site. Don't be surprised if that becomes a major drawing point for the engine. It does run a little slow for regular Google users, though. I would try to speed up the interface, somehow.

- posted by Nathan Weinberg @ 10/05/2004 10:42:00 PM