Worio is a new search engine that uses recommendation technologies to improve the search experience quite a bit. If that is all Greek to you: Worio transfers the “people who bought this also bought that” thingie from online shopping to web search. Because just like an online shop, a search engine is different things to different people.

To gain the needed knowledge, worio doubles as a social bookmarking site like delicious to learn more abut the content of the web and its users.

This combination seems to work reasonably well. As the public failure of cuil to present flattering images for people’s names showed, ego searching is an important first test for a new search engine. Worio passed with distinction for me. When searching for myself, it suggested to look for famous machine learning researchers as well. This is not only flattering, but also rather useful for people not in the area.

Using my profile, Worio was also way more quick in finding the ICML 2009. That, to me, means “International Conference of Machine Learning” and not “International Congress on Medical Librarianship” as yahoo! spits out by default. Search is just not the same thing for all people anymore, if it ever was.

But maybe Worio is heavily biased towards machine learning topics as it was leaving stealth mode at NIPS this year and hundreds of machine learners were its first users thereafter?

Does worio work for you?

As a side note: It cannot be worse than MSN, Yahoo! or Google, as it uses them if you choose to.

You will still be able to enjoy the recommendations if you do so.

For the original post and more, visit Markus Weimer’s blog

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 8:28 am and is filed under Guest Authors, Newcomers, Reviews. 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.