A search engine built by the crowd, that does not suck
Google’s PageRank has revolutionized search, but over the last ten years it has forced every other search engine to look and act like Google. This has made it almost impossible to establish a better, modern search engine other than Google, granted its popularity is the major indicator for its quality. Nice for Google, not so nice for healthy competition.
Meet the DwellRank
During our work at archify, a private search engine across the content of your browsing history, Max and I realised that there is one core metric that could be an alternative to the PageRank. We learned that the biggest commitment a user can make to a web page and content, is the time the user spends on it. We can safely assume that a web page where users only spend a few seconds on is not as important as a page where they spend several minutes. That’s a much stronger commitment than hitting a like button can ever be. And it’s a stronger indication for quality content than links between machines. We call this new way of ranking pages, DwellRank. Dwellrank is a better way to find the right search results, based on the time users actually spend on the page.
Meet Blippex
After 2 years of valuable experience with archify we decided to build a search engine called Blippex, which is based on the DwellRank. We’ve built extensions for all major browsers (sorry IE), which sends the URL of the web page and the time they spent on it to our servers. The database is built by the input from humans, which helps create the Blippex search engine. It is also available for everyone, even if you have not installed the extension (but you should install it!). The challenge around Blippex is finding enough people who are willing to share their data. As a result, we have created many privacy safeguards. If you use the extension we will only save three data points:
Source
Google’s PageRank has revolutionized search, but over the last ten years it has forced every other search engine to look and act like Google. This has made it almost impossible to establish a better, modern search engine other than Google, granted its popularity is the major indicator for its quality. Nice for Google, not so nice for healthy competition.
Meet the DwellRank
During our work at archify, a private search engine across the content of your browsing history, Max and I realised that there is one core metric that could be an alternative to the PageRank. We learned that the biggest commitment a user can make to a web page and content, is the time the user spends on it. We can safely assume that a web page where users only spend a few seconds on is not as important as a page where they spend several minutes. That’s a much stronger commitment than hitting a like button can ever be. And it’s a stronger indication for quality content than links between machines. We call this new way of ranking pages, DwellRank. Dwellrank is a better way to find the right search results, based on the time users actually spend on the page.
Meet Blippex
After 2 years of valuable experience with archify we decided to build a search engine called Blippex, which is based on the DwellRank. We’ve built extensions for all major browsers (sorry IE), which sends the URL of the web page and the time they spent on it to our servers. The database is built by the input from humans, which helps create the Blippex search engine. It is also available for everyone, even if you have not installed the extension (but you should install it!). The challenge around Blippex is finding enough people who are willing to share their data. As a result, we have created many privacy safeguards. If you use the extension we will only save three data points:
Source
