Gravee Search Engine

Gr@vee (pronounced like the stuff you'd put on mashed potatoes) wants to be your new search engine/social bookmarking/tagging site.

Competing against Google, MSN et al. is a rather tall order, but they are coming at it with some unique ideas. My expectation is that they'll be over and done with in the blink of an eye, but maybe some of their ideas will resonate through to the big boys.

First up, they let you, the searcher, vote on whether the results displayed are relevant. This is a big, big hole in Google and most other search engines. It's important both individually (don't show me *that* if I search again for the same subject) and collectively (if twenty thousand people said that page isn't about donuts and only one said it is, it isn't about donuts and you shouldn't show it to me). Unfortunately, Gr@vee seems to only have understood the collective side of that, so unless and until a lot of people start using it, it isn't any more helpful than Google.

Gr@vee also offers to share revenue with both content providers and searchers. Content providers claim their content, and Gravee supposedly will share ad revenue with the folks whose content came up from the search. That's nice, but makes absolutely no sense: let's say you are searching for whatever, and my page is one of the results shown. You ignore that, and all the other pages listed, and click on an ad instead. Just what did our pages have to do with anything? I sure don't know, but I'll take the money if there ever is any. Unfortunately, so would all the spammers, and that's the fly in this boat of gravy.

The offer to share with users is perhaps more sensible. As a user, you can create bookmark pages and share them. It's not quite clear to me how anyone would ever see your shared pages (will they be part of search results? That seems unlikely) but if they ever do, and happen to click on ads, you get part of the booty. I think it would be far more interesting if Gr@vee shared revenue with people who rate and tag results: in other words, if you were one of the folks who accurately (as determined by consensus) rated the relevance of a page and added tags that helped it be found, then you should get part of any revenue that would otherwise go to the site owner. Wouldn't that make more sense? It would also provide incentive to rate and tag - and there is absolutely no incentive now.

So, maybe (a very big maybe) if they offered something like that, and made you log in with a human verification system before you could rate sites (to stop the splogs from driving up their ratings with 'bots), maybe this could be really good stuff. Unfortunately, the need for constant verification that you have eyes and opposable thumbs would make it so annoying that it wouldn't work anyway. I hate to be a pessimist, but I think that's reality.

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