Some new features to have fun with :)

Its 3am and I am dead tired, but I just have to post about these new features before I crash.

The first thing we did, was add a new feature to hopefully make Aftervote easier to navigate for first time users. The idea is to allow new users to choose a search level, which will only enable certain features, making things (hopefully) easier for them to transition to.

The settings for this work out to be:

Legend: AOA = all of above, RR = Results Returned, SS = Safe Search

Globals = PDF/DOC=No show, Privacy=OFF, Weights=100/100/100, Hide Blacklist

——————
Basic = Result, Summary, URL, Open Supplementals, RR=10/10, SS=On, Voting Frame=OFF
——————
Intermediate = AOA + Commenting, Closed Supplementals, Tagging, Pagerank, Stumbleupon, Digg, Delicious, RR=50/50, SS=On, Voting Frame=ON
——————
Advanced = AOA + Sorting, Closed Supplementals, Black/Whitelist, Alexa, RR=100/100, SS=Off, Voting Frame=ON

——————

Thats not all though, Oh no- its not even close to being done yet.
Say hello to video search, foreign charachter support, major speed improvements, tons of bug fixes and of course -miscellaneous spelling fixes! 😀

Check the Changelog for more info.

God himself has acknowledged our presence

I was reading over a review from Dave Naylor today when I noticed in the comments that god himself (Matt Cutts) knows we exist. This could quite possibly be the most exciting moment of my week.

This was in regards to This Post which describes AfterVote in a semi positive manner (Hey, cant please em all ) and apparently Matt didn’t know we changed names to AfterVote.

Rebranding and Responding to User Feedback

Almost two weeks ago, Younanimous was featured on Digg. We’ve been hard at work developing new features and ideas generated from the comments and feedback submissions we’ve received. Thank you to those who left us feedback, we sincerely appreciate it!

We would like to present a partial list of features which were requested by our users:

1. Rebranding – Younanimous is now known as AfterVote – which reflects our idea of using social search to vote relevant sites to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Previously, we were known as younanimous.com because we wanted to emphasize user privacy. However, a majority of our users felt the name was too long and hard to remember. Just as before, AfterVote does not save any personal information or search history, and does not require an account. Users are tracked via a salted IP Hash which cannot be used to identify anyone.

2. Blacklist/Whitelist – Are you sick of Wikipedia dominating your results? If so, simply Blacklist it and never see results from them again. On the other hand, if Wikipedia is your primary source of information, Whitelist the site and results from Wikipedia, pertaining to your query, will show up first. You can even place low ranking results to the top. Blacklisting or Whitelisting domains is user-specific and does not affect everyone using AfterVote.

3. Dynamic Sorting – If you want to see how AfterVote’s results compare to Google, Yahoo or MSN you can click their respective icons and instantly see how their results would be displayed.

4. Passive Voting – Unhappy with the results you’re finding? If you continuously visit a site, hit the Back button, and find a more relevant site, our algorithm is able to distinguish whether or not you found a site helpful. It will passively vote for the relevant site and improve our algorithm. If the site was particularly helpful, you can still manually vote for it as well!

5. Weighting System – Give greater weight to the search engines – MSN, Yahoo, or Google – you favor.

Keep an eye out for some of our upcoming features, including: allowing users to use custom CSS stylesheets, static or dynamic widgets, saving search history, and social bookmark integration with public or private settings as well as commenting on results.

A brief introduction to AfterVote

I am writing this post to introduce any new users or old users who havent reviewed the site in a week or so, To let everyone catch up on whats new, and whats shaking. I would say the most obvious thing is that we have changed names to AfterVote as it reflects accurately what we accomplish, by voting on pre-established algorithms from major search engines, then voting on them afterwards.

So to the Newbie, What is AfterVote? Simply, Its a customizable search engine that takes results from Google, MSN and Yahoo, and combines the data into one big search mash up. The advantage of AfterVote over all other engines is the ability to input dynamic widgets and statuses per result and you have as much tools as you could want to define your own, personal algorithm. No accounts are required, No personal info is saved, Its completely anonymous as well- We keep track of you via a salted IP Hash, which cannot lead back to you.

So what features do we have? We have a Blacklist and White list, which will respectively remote a site from results (from your view) permanently, and white list will prioritize a site to the #1 position for your view, even if its #30.

We also have dynamic widgets for Alexa, Pagerank, StumbleUpon and more, which give valueable data about EACH result. There is Live sorting, which will let you instantly view how the results appear in google, msn or yahoo- Or even by highest pagerank or alexa first.

There are tons of static widgets which let your results be interacted with by popular services like del.icio.us, digg, blogger, archive.org and much more.

We have a stat bar to the left of each result, showing the position the result was in each respective engine. We have a weighting system which lets you choose which engine has the best results.

In short, You can customize almost every aspect of AfterVote (Soon, Even the CSS)

So why is this different than the other social search engines? Simple- We take the ‘known to all’ ‘digg style’ algorithm, and apply a passive voting system to traditional results. The problem with diggs voting system is that only a very small percentage of motivated users vote on a story, or comment. Because of this, cliques and groups start to form, sharing interests, which will remove diversity. By using our silent method, we track where you click, if you come back and much more- Every result you click is a vote that AfterVote understands. As we gather more data, and results are not public melting-pot views on voting becomes a non issue, as does abuse and gaming.

Since we initially launched AfterVote (Then Younanimous) we have done 7 major updates, (Yes, Including a Opera fix) and have accomplished alot of what we initially wanted for AfterVote. Up next, we will be adding in features which will take search to the next level. One has to realize, that even if google, yahoo or msn was to ever release a social search engine (Which yahoo sort of has) The results will never be as good as AfterVotes’ simply because of the diversity that we bring. We are currently receiving a peak of 6500 searches per hour, and a little over 100k searches per day. Thanks for making AfterVote grow!

Here is a sneak peak at whats next for AfterVote – As you can see its mostly account based:

User accounts creation / data saving

>>Social Bookmarking ala delicious with pub or private settings
>>Tagging results (goes with above, I suppose)
>>Search history (option to save or not)
>>Comments on results
>>”last time you searched, you chose …”
>>aftervote.com/popular would aggregate 72 hours popular public bookmarks
>>Ability for users to submit there own custom css, or custom widgets (static or dynamic)

Release 8 is live!

Well, we have put release 8 live.

Check out the Changelog to get a idea of some of the changes we did. Up next is video search + optional user accounts + commenting + custom bookmarking service + fixing all the bugs we just created.

And just a note to everyone out in the wilderness- AfterVote is still being self funded. If you know of someone who can throw some (significant) dollars to make AV reach the masses it deserves, please contact us with details. Even if we never receive any capital though, we are still good to go and will continue to make AV the best engine available.

Anyways, Stop reading this and start enjoying the search engine!!

Google, You are still part of the problem

For some reason, people judge a search engine based on how many results it finds. When Ron showed Younanimous to his father, He thought it was crap because we only gave 5 pages of results for a term, Vs. finding 1-90999999 on google. Well, I have come to put this to rest- As more isnt always better, and if you actually wade down the pages, You will find that when Google says they have 1 billion results, you may be surprised to see the results end on page 13

For example:

Personalized Results 1 – 10 of about 76,800 for younanimous. (0.04 seconds)

Really? 77,000 Results for a term that had under 20 hits 2 weeks ago? Thats a little bit of a shock.  Lets see how many pages we can go.

Oh Mr. Google. I am dissapointed in you. Do you mean to tell me thatyou have 75,000 results in supplemental? Thats a tad crazy isnt it?

The point of this post is that raw hard numbers doesn’t mean a better result for your search term- it just means thousands of copies of the same data, over and over again. This is a major problem with the search engines of today, as so much screen scraping is going on, it is getting difficult for engines like google and msn to know who indeed was the original author.

Take this as a example. Let say, Just as I click ‘post’ to this blog article, Scraper-robot-guy comes and scrapes this post, and blogs it on his own spammer site. Now lets say google indexes his site before mine. How is google to know that the article belongs to this site, and not the scraper?

Thats all for now- Expect many updates today- Hopefully including opera and safari fixes, as well as a bunch of goodies.

More updates, and more to come!

Howdy folks,

We have gotten alot done these past few days, and are getting even more done as time goes on. So I will skip the foreplay and get right into it. We have added a settings page, accessible via the top right links on searches, which allows you to alot of cool stuff, including removing widgets you do not want, adding stuff you do, being anonymous, turning on and off safesearch and various other options to enhance your viewing pleasure 🙂

See screenshot below for settings rundown

Now we have another very cool feature, The sorting. Now you can sort results after the fact to your pleasure, by just clicking the icon. Want to see the google results? Just click! Highest alexa first? Click! Pagerank? You got it.

To go back to the default view, just click the younanimous icon.

We have also worked out a deal with compete.com, whereas we will have full access to all of the data we could ever need. This gives us such things as a comparison traffic level and if a site is deemed ‘safe’ or not. I encourage all users to checkout compete.com, as the results they provide are much more scaled and reliable than alexa in many cases and are sure to be making alot of waves.

Anyways, We plan on adding Blacklisting by domain, subdomain, page only and negative vote, as well as Positive vote for domain, result, and “prioritize this domain” which will make future searches where the domain.com is indexed have more priority. (Does that make sense?)

Anyways, thats all for now, unless you count the semi modified look and different ajax loading method! Take care, and keep on searching people!!

Explaining the widgets

Scooter made up a cool image showing what the default younanimous widgets to. Click it to check it out!

Click to view

Welcome to younanimous.

Great… Another search engine.

Boy do we hear ya, and what makes us think that this has any chance of being better than the all-mighty search gods Google, Yahoo and MSN? Its easy actually. 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 was they were unfeasably 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”. Here’s a example. You do a search for “Social Search Engine” and you click the first result. It’s not what you were looking for at all, and is therefore not a useful result for your query. You press the back button and try result #2. Voila! You found exactly what you are looking for. But it’s more than that. Younanimous is analyzing these results and has cast a vote for you, automatically, saying that result #1 wasn’t what you wanted, but #2 was. If you do however find a awesome site, You can manually vote for it as well.

Ever find sites that never have the info you want, but are always at the top of the serps? Yes, we are looking at you Experts-Exchange.com… Well, now you can blacklist pages or entire domains from showing up in your listings, No more crap! And say goodbye to spam. With a “Spam!” Tag, you can help eliminate bogus results from the serps one spam site at a time.

Dont take our word for it, try this. Do a Google, MSN, or Yahoo search for a common spammer term. Viagra would be a good test. Look at how on these engines, spam just takes up all the spots. Now try it on Younanimous. You will be hardpressed to find anything unofficial, and thats why Younanimous works.

Another cool thing is that you don’t need a account to enjoy all the awesomeness of Younanimous. It’s all stored in a cookie! Of course, you can create one if you want to, and share your settings at work and gramma’s house, but it’s totally up to you!

But theres more! Amazing coolness awaits as you can develop your own widgets and algorithms based upon your searches! Do you value Alexa rank more than life itself? Now you can have the sites with the highest Alexa rank at the top! What about a combination of Google Pagerank and Alexa? That works also! Domain age? Yep. Del.icio.us links? Yep. Digg homepaged? Yep. You name it, you can have it.

And finally, We know we dont even ‘come close’ to being as cool as Google. Fact is, we wouldnt exist without the fantastic work of Google, MSN, and Yahoo. So props to you big companys who have made the web what it is. We salute you!