It’s time for the Open Web Awards! What are they? They are the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Now say that 10 times…slow. They honor the top achievements in 26 categories, but we, of course, will be covering just one of them – the search category. Figures.

The first Open Web Awards achieved over 250,000 votes combined between Mashable and our 50 international blog partners. The first and final voting rounds will be held from November 19th up until December 15th. The top three search winners, from number three to one, are:

Scour

Here’s a nice little video about Scour.

Founded in 2007, Scour was originally named Aftervote.com, a search engine with an AJAX backbone with one mission: to deliver the most relevant results as efficiently as possible. Almost exactly 1 year later, Aftervote was acquired by Internext media, owner and operator of the ABCSearch Network and re-branded to Scour.com.

Scour’s purpose is to bridge the gap between searchers and relevant results. How? Social search. It’s not new, but the fact that Scour scored so big among a quarter million voters means that they must have taken the correct twist on the path. Users can leave comments, rate results, and make search more relevant for its members.

Finding Dulcinea

Remind you of Man of La Mancha? Well, it really shouldn’t, unless you’ve seen the play, read the book, or otherwise came in contact with Don Quixote’s imaginary love. FindingDulcinea

According to them, internet users are faced with a similar quest for the imaginary Dulcinea as they seek ideal Web sites in a vast expanse of information. They’re probably right. FindingDulcinea tries to present only credible, trustworthy Web sites, saving time for the novice and the experienced user alike.

Each piece, whether a Web Guide, a Beyond the Headlines story or a Netcetera article, receives the same research before being included in the database. The Web sites included in each piece are connected through original narrative, providing users with information on each site before they even click on it.

Artiklz

Artiklz enables conversational search by aggregating discussions around the social media, answering the question of who, where, why, when, and what people are discussing across the social media. Hard to understand that sentence? Thank the Lord for video:

Artiklz accomplishes this by providing a series of widgets which serve to aggregate and manage user generated blog or website content. The rationale is simple; Content Sharing, Rating, Review and Blogging services have become the mainstream venues for communicating and connecting publicly for a vast majority of the internet population. And Artiklz’s goal is to be the centralized aggregator for this dynamic user generated content.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 2:42 am and is filed under Alts, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.