The following post is a sponsored review for Younanimous.com
When I got the description for Younanimous.com I thought hey cool let’s see what this is:
Younanimous is a social search engine, adding in the best from all worlds with a very dynamic and very unique way of searching.
However when I got there I was a little disappointed to learn it was a meta search engine that aggregates the click behavior of users into it’s algorithm. While I like their premise About aftervote – The social search engine
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.
I do however disagree with the logic, or at least the way I understand the implementation (I completely agree about sites like experts-exchange being cloaking spammers and getting a free ride in Google).
Let’s look at an actual SERP:
Basically the engine is looking at Google, Yahoo, and MSN SERP’s and using the power of those search engines to determine their rankings. The logic being if you rank well in all three, you are a quality site not just one who caters to a bias any particular engine may have. You’ll see the individual rankings from the individual engines on the left hand side. You get the alexa rank and page rank all in one spot, so if you’re paranoid about toolbar or plugins phoning home this may be a plus for you. Not sure how the social bookmark plugins help but, but hey if it’s lets you say your social or web 2.0 then why not.
Ok looking at the “plus” and “minus” buttons that’s where I have a problem. As I understand it the more people use the “minus” key the more it affects everyone’s results, which IMHO has the potential to be very bad. If this engine were to attain critical mass and a large userbase, this is a potentially dangerous “feature”. Now since the page is rendered in Ajax (ugh) they may say it’s more “immune to clickfraud (see Are Ajax Applications Immune to Clickbots) however it is something I’d watch for, and remember I still predict we’ll see an Ajax based SERP from Google in the next 10 months. If it were me I’d make decisions like that only affect each individual users results, and not aggregated them into the community as a whole, then again I’m not a big fan of personalization at all, so take that from where it comes.
I was really interested in taking a look at the video search but that’s only in “alpha” testing right now, so maybe I’ll come back in a few months and take a look. One really nice feature is in the “my settings” where you can control, experiment and “fiddle” with sliders to emphasize/de-emphasize certain factors. That’s a really cool feature for power users.
Is this a product I’d use every day or as my primary search engine, no, I’m too concerned about the influence click tracking would have on SERPs. However I do think it’s a nice auxiliary research tool if you’re evaluating a new keyword space or one you aren’t too familiar with.
The preceding has been a sponsored review using the ReviewMe service. If you are interested in having me review your product please visit
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