Younanimous is a AJAX-powered social search engine that provides users with additional details such as the Alexa Ranking, Google Page Rank and domain age for each website.
What’s interesting is the additional of social sharing buttons at the bottom of every individual link result. This allows you to instantly submit each link to websites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit.
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”.
Apparently Younanimous also allows you to decide what shows up in the search results: You can flag entire domains as spam and remove them from your results listings.
What you will see on the Younanimous’s results page is a collusion of rankings from Google, Yahoo and MSN after they are weighed against Younanimous’s own database of user votes and activity.
Younanimous also plans to develop specific widgets and plugins via their API, which will allow you to sort your results according to factors such as Alexa rankings, Page Rank, Digg popularity and domain age.
I found the search engine to be rather slow but I really like the AJAX backbone, which allows one to browse through different results pages rapidly. However, the interface feels a little too bunched up and the future addition of advertising will undoubtedly lead to greater visual clutter.
The combination of social ranking and the traditional search engine algorithms is interesting and the potential to sort results according to social popularity will produce results that are relevant and link worthy for casual surfers and researchers.
According to the Younanimous blog, video search as well as the addition of Compete.com and StumbleUpon graphs are planned. It’ll be interesting to see how Younanimous turns out in the next few weeks.
(via Digg)
