Social Web - Younanimous: Meta-Search Engine With Interactivity

For some time, I have been wondering how good it would be if Google allows web searchers to RANK/ Rate the search results? That would cut out a lot of irrelevant searches. Well, it seems, Younanimous answers some questions. Straight from the source:

“Younanimous is a new twist on a old idea. For years now, sites have existed as “meta search engines” which would search Google, Yahoo and MSN. The problem with these search engines is that they were unbearably slow, as they had to query Google, Yahoo, and MSN before they had anything to display.

Enter Younanimous: With an AJAX backbone, YOU Search Google, MSN, and Yahoo and let us know what you found and then we rank them for you, while providing additional detail about each result such as Alexa ranking, Google Pagerank, domain age and much more.

So what? It’s a fast meta search engine. Who cares? Wait, there’s more… Not only are we a meta search engine, but we also have a passive voting system in place. Today, everyone is familiar with sites like Digg and Shoutwire. These sites let the users decide what is a good story, and what’s not. We are applying this same principle to search results without having to go through all that work of clicking buttons to vote for a site’s “coolness"."

MY REVIEW:

Features:

1. YN crawls: Google, MSN, and Yahoo.
2. Shows two ranks: Alexa, and Google PageRank.
3. Lets the user bookmark via: digg, del.icio.us, furl, reddit
4. Has a “LiveSort” function. Sort results by search engine rank.
5. has a cool ”Compete” set of functions. You can check out a site’s profile, trustworthiness, policies and stuff.
6. I love a yet un-initiated feature. I can see a red (-) and a green (+) button for each search result. It says “coming soon” as of now, but it means Younanimous is giving us a long-desired feature: TURN OFF unwanted search results. Wow!

Comments:
1. Why this they choose such a horrid name? Neither the name nor the spelling is memorable. And I am a writer an amateur ex-editor.
2. Name again: also thought they are an anonymizer service.
3. The interface is Google-clean. I like the colors.
4. Not as fast as you’d wish. I almost went away. But they are in Beta, so I guess it’ll improve at proper launch time.
5. I checked by searching myself. Apparently, it’s still Google that gives a much better idea of who I am, though I am in competition with Ramla the MidEast city. Don’t know YN’s algorithm (method of searching) - but I think they are tilted somehow. I only see a recent interview of mine being all over the place - and I wonder if YN is more of a “popularity engine.” That could be on the opposite side of too-much-irrelevant-stuff on the Search Spectrum: only one news that made the rounds. Hmmm. It’s nothing personal, it’s just search.

Overall rank:

6 out of 10. I really like YN because it is selective and it gives a lot of added functionality. You can DO SOMETHING with the search results. I am still a bit skeptical about the whole POPULARITY TILT of the search engine.

Yet again, it’s a “Social Search Engine” - what else should I expect?