Over the last 6 months, I've been working with a Silicon Valley start-up called Wowd. I'm happy to announce that they're announcing their public launch today at Web 2.0 in San Francisco. Here's a review of what they do and why it matters:
Wowd is a real-time search engine for discovering what's popular on the web right now.
Like other real-time search engines, Wowd delivers information seconds after it appears on the web. Unlike others, Wowd covers the entire web – any publically available page, from any web site, anywhere, can potentially be included in the Wowd index.
Like reference search engines, Wowd performs indexing and ranking of search results… but it does so in a way that takes into account pages preferred by real users. Wowd does not use crawlers that mindlessly follow links, filling an index with material that real people would never look at. Wowd finds and ranks information according to the preferences and interests of real humans.
Members of the Wowd user community, the "Wowd Crowd", determine web page popularity. Traditional search ranking methods are based on how pages link to each other, and this approach has been thoroughly gamed by web site publishers seeking search engine optimization. People are much better at finding good web pages and avoiding bad ones than computer programs will ever be. So Wowd taps into this human judgment and gives higher ranking to the pages people choose to visit.
Wowd users nominate public pages for inclusion in the index just by visiting them. When a Wowd Crowd member visits a public web page, it is automatically nominated, and the page is immediately added to the index. No explicit voting or manual voting is required.
The Wowd Crowd is surfing the web twenty-four hours a day, automatically nominating new public web pages for inclusion in the index. A new page is made available to all Wowd Crowd members just seconds after only one of them finds it. Thus, Wowd provides a real-time index that spans the entire scope of the human-readable public web.
Wowd delivers search results that real people find interesting. Wowd achieves both comprehensive coverage of the entire web and real-time performance through an innovative, distributed cloud architecture.
Other real-time search engines 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 can be included in the Wowd index, provided they are nominated by a member of the Wowd Crowd.
Wowd delivers popular and timely information in three ways: (1) a real-time Wowd Hot List of popular web pages that updates live before your eyes; (2) ability to search for specific items and sort results according to popularity or freshness; (3) ability search your own previously visited pages, making it extremely easy to find those pages again.
Wowd is a real-time search engine that helps you discover what's popular on the web right now. Wowd's unique approach is to run as a web browser application, eliminating the need to share personal information with centralized servers. Wowd protects your privacy. Wowd does not collect personally identifiable information and does not share your search history or browsing history with anyone, including Wowd, Inc.
In summary, Wowd is a great way to find out what real people are talking about, right now, on the web.
Check out Wowd at www.wowd.com
