Via Mark Evans, I just had a quick peak around PreFound, a new search engine that enables you to “search what people have already found”. This human-filtered approach to a search engine isn’t a bad idea, but I think they’ve made some very old-school mistakes:
- Their search results pages don’t have unique URLs.
- No RSS feeds.
- In order to add new search results to their database (the fundamental idea of PreFound), I have to download and install the PreFound PFfinder toolkit–a desktop application. If I’m using my browser to search (like most humans), why can’t I use my browser to add results to PreFound?
- Their search results, frankly, are lame. They prepopulated their database with data from the Open Directory Project, but that doesn’t seem to have helped. Search for “linen suit” (one of my common litmus test phrases) and the first result is for Leisure Suit Larry. Search for “Darren Barefoot”, and I’m nowhere to be seen.
They’ll have to leverage a tremendous amount of user goodwill (or a lot of cheap Indian and Chinese searchers) to transform their database into something that can compete with the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN. Here’s another short article about PreFound.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
thrilling
Thanks for giving PreFound.com a look. The PreFound.com team wanted to address some of the specific issues you brought up in your post here very quickly.
– PreFound.com offers Find Groups instead of standard search results. These Find Groups contain text and multimedia links that do indeed have unique URL’s. Offering users organized Groups of relevant results seemed to be a better method to us compared to what’s out there with traditional search sites now.
– RSS Feeds are coming in the first or second quarter of ’06. We want to offer RSS Feeds that are really helpful, and the Feeds we’ll be offering will relate to specific topics and tags that the user is looking for on PreFound.com and/or the uploads from specific PreFound.com users. See the PreFound.com Blog at http://prefound.blogspot.com for details.
– The free PFfinder is a download. This puts PreFound.com in line with the bulk of community search and tagging sites, since almost all of them require some type of small download. Also, the PFfinder is an application that users can benefit from regardless of whether they want to share links with the community or not. Many of our beta testers used the PFfinder to build their xmas lists, for example. See http://www.prefound.com/tip.php We’ve tried to make it as useful as possible, and we really appreciate the fact that downloading and installing our toolkit is a really nice thing for them to do.
– We need the help and support of everyone out there to make our search results as good as they can be. We expect the ODP results to be completely overtaken by the Find Groups that our community has, just this week, begun to upload.
As you know, PreFound.com just launched Jan. 17th, so we really are brand new. PreFound.com is based on the premise that communities of knowledgeable, interested people can identify relevant sites with greater precision than a traditional search engine. Our goal is to build a search community much like the guys over at Wikipedia built a reference community or Del.icio.us built a tagging community. Needless to say, and as you referenced in your post, it will take a lot of work, time and participation from a lot of users in order for PreFound.com to reach its potential. But, much like the organizations mentioned above, who started with tiny communities of people participating, we believe it can succeed.
As you also mentioned, since our community just started to build last Tuesday, the bulk of our search results Find Groups have been preloaded by us and are based on the ODP (which is still utilized in some fashion by sites like Google and Yahoo). We did that because we didn’t want to start our community site with no search results at all and simply wait for users to start uploading. We wanted to give users a place to start, at least, before going out on the web with PFfinder to build some Groups and share them with us. Before long, the ODP Find Groups will become the minority as our community grows, and what people like us have found and shared will take its place. Also, on PreFound.com, using human-based indexing and the PFfinder, you can group multimedia links with text links into one Group. Take a look at http://preview.prefound.com/view.php?cp_id=274065 as an example. In that Group (about sweet potato pie recipes) you can get a nice text-based recipe from Cooks.com and Low-Fat-Recipes.com, listen to how to make the pie in a podcast from KCRW and watch a chef make the pie in a video from the Food Network. All in one Group result from simply searching on “sweet potato pie” on PreFound.com. That’s really taking full advantage of what the web has to offer in one quick swipe. Let’s see them do that on Google or Yahoo! We just need for users out there to build a lot more Groups like that.
We at PreFound.com are committed to building a community that will be a place where users can come first, before visiting a traditional algorithmic search engine, to see if what they are looking for has already been found, and maybe save themselves a lot of work. If they don’t find it on PreFound, we’d hope that they would go out with the PFfinder, tag it, then share it with PreFound.com so someone else doesn’t have to duplicate their work. In order to make this a reality, we need as much support as possible. It’s a community and we can’t do it without the support of users out there. Thanks again for giving it a look.