You might have come across Twitter’s popular search mechanism which displays the results on the fly. Now Wowd provides similar kind of search feature in real time on browsers for the first time. Wowd is in a private invite stage and after getting an invite, you need to download a 10 MB application to make Wowd work for you.
Wowd claims that their search mechanism of finding good web pages with appropriate information is based on the human judgment but not through software bots and crawlers. The ‘good’ web pages are nominated to be displayed in the browser based on the people nominating them, by just viewing them. So, a view is basically considered a vote in the Wowd system and I suppose this is not completely flawless.
Wowd boasts about having a total understanding over the popular sites that are doing good on the entire web(Google doesn’t know this, yet), and delivers the real time results based on the computations performed on various top and popular sites being referred by all social media sites, all news sites, all blog sites…
Here is an excerpt
Other real-time search services achieve timeliness at the expense of comprehensiveness. These services typically index just a handful of sites. In contrast, Wowd delivers real-time results from the entire web, including all social media sites, all news sites, all blog sites… in fact, all public sites, everywhere, can be included in the Wowd index.
How to Use it?
As I said earlier Wowd is in a invite only stage and you need to provide an email address at their site. Once you get an invite, you need to download a 10 MB application which runs on the local computer as a web browser application.
The application sits in the system tray and when you click it, it displays a local search engine running on your system, but not from the Wowd site. You can even mail or tweet or write on your Facebook wall from the comfort of a single web page. And, if you find any web site from the results to be inappropriate, you can give a thumbs down to that particular site making it loose the vote count.
But, I don’t see a registration form, anywhere?
Wowd does not ask its users to register and there is no registration process involved.
Wowd, I suppose becomes more interesting and clever once it scans the entire web or at least top social media sites and pools in the sites without needing us to visiting multiple social book marking sites(to starters).
One word of caution, though, is that I have observed Wowd application to be eavesdropping on my Google search history too. I observed this as I installed this app and when I searched for something using Google, Wowd displayed the Web History promptly. I track my web history using Google Account itself, so I do not want some one else to be eavesdropping on me to know what I am searching for.
System resources required for Wowd are a lot similar to what you need to run Windows Vista. Here is the list:
- CPU: Pentium 4 class or better
- RAM: minimum 512 MB RAM, but for best performance, 1GB or more
- Disk: 1GB free disk space on your hard drive
- Internet connection: 256 Kbps or better
Wowd caters to various OS users too with different flavors. Wowd supports Windows, Mac OS, Linux 32–bit and 64–bit. You select which version you need to download and use based on your OS.
Wowd is observed to be a system heavy process consuming nearly 120 MB of system’s memory. That’s not good for a web application. I suppose the private server running on the client machine does take that much of space and I hope Wowd team can reduce that in the future versions.
I am going to try out on this new kind of search engine and find out the different ways I can tweak in order to attain my desired results. I will post an update if I find anything out of the blue.
Thanks for the detailed post. You really did your homework!
One point of clarification. Since Wowd runs as a client on your computer all Web History data, search history data, etc. stays on your local system. Because of the full peer-to-peer architecture of the Wowd software we (the Wowd company) have no central logs whatsoever. We don’t know which pages you visit or what searches you do. We do collect anonymous, aggregated statistical data which is used to help identify the best pages for searches done by members of the Wowd community.
So while your Wowd client software is “eavesdropping” on your web activity in order to build the statistical model and create your personal web history, we aren’t!
- Bill York, VP of Engineering, Wowd
Hi Bill, Thanks for the comment and prompt response. As per your quote of "We do collect anonymous, aggregated statistical data which is used to help identify the best pages….", I suppose this rings the bell of Wowd collecting information that is pertained to Google search and not it's own. I presume this is nothing but going through the web history of mine, which surely alarms people because once Wowd reaches vast network, I assume ads will be placed based on the current and local search trends.
Correct me if I am wrong. Please do take "eavesdropping" in a comic sense
I meant it as a review, not a bull fight.
I just downloaded and installed Wowd. I’ll have to give it immediate high marks for relevance.
I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it means — but in the cool animated real-time Wowd Hotlist, sorted by popularity, in the first 20 most popular, in addition to a couple xkcd cartoons I’ve seen, at #14, an Open Salon article on College Education as a Monopoly by Kent Pitman, an old friend of mine — and this article, #20, the first I clicked on — complete with a reply by Bill York.
Bill, Kent, and I used to work together, decades ago, at a company called Symbolics (symbolics.com was the first registered domain name!), and were friends at MIT even before that. Talk about relevance!
At this stage, I have no idea whether this is a fluke — but looking at the relevance of the other items, it’s still a very impressive start. Every single listed article has relevance to me personally.
It may be that I share a lot in common with the other beta testers. If so, to get that sort of result with broader usage, it might need to leverage your social graph — people you know (via social media), or people who tend to visit the same or similar pages (clustering).
It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
PS: While I’ve been writing this, your article has moved up to #8!
.-= Bob Kerns´s last blog ..Dear Mr. President: Why we shouldn’t change healthcare (NOT!) =-.
Hi Bob, thanks for joining in the conversation.I observed the 'relevancy' of the search results provided by Wowd and I am, for sure, amazed by them. They were precise and on the dot, seldom what we see in the new search engines. Probably Wowd needs a good marketing team and great breakthrough. And also, not to forget the crawlers to make it through social media and networking sites with the right tags and categories to index based on keywords.
I would also like to look at the usage graph, if I can lay my eyes on it, of course.