David Hayden, of Critical Path and Magellan reknown, today launched a new search engine called JetEye. The concept is interesting – you can create your own set of search results (“jetpaks”), which you can share with others and make searchable. This combines the idea of the architecture of participation and the force of many with the currently in vogue concept of social search.
David gave me a tour of Jeteye late last week, and as with many of these ideas, it really all depends on whether or not folks pick up the habit (the Wondir QA engine comes to mind, for example.) For now, it’s a promising start up, and the key will be whether it reaches critical mass.
MediaPost coverage.
Maybe I’m too stupid, but I’m missing the pain point it is addressing. I can see why people would want to share stuff like photos, music, links, etc. but a) packages of content so that b) they are searchable by c) a group of people? x) when would I need to do this? and y) why would I spend the time to do it? I guess I’m just not seeing the value created here.
Jeteye’s Jetbot was doing a really good job last year with burning up bandwidth on a pretty large scale:
http://www.platinax.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=1149
Shame that they gave up on trying to make the spidering work, as it’s hard to see why the world needs yet another meta-engine with a single gimmick.
I’m not sure about this idea. The “Jetpacks” would only have value if the manually created search results were better than the normal Google search results.
But they don’t seem to be, at least for the examples I tried. For example, on Jeteye searches for “news” and “amazon“, the Jetpacks shown appear to be much less useful than the Google search results below.
Some might argue that this will get better with time, but I have a hard time believing that these manually created search results ever will be better than the automated relevance rank from Google. In fact, I’d suspect these Jetpacks will mostly be spam, created by people who want to drive traffic to their own sites.