Blippex: By the People, For the People
October 17, 2014
Would Blippex be the search engine Alexis de Toqueville would love? The search engine is, according to Bloomberg, “a new crowd sourced public search engine.” Blippex makes use of technology developed for Archify, a system providing users with access to their online history. According to CrunchBase, the system has received seed funding of $700,000.
A year ago, Blippex was described as “the first interesting search engine since Google?” Like Qwant, Blippex is a search system crafted in Europe. Like Qwant, Blippex has ambitions for nibbling into Google’s market share for Web search.
The idea is that the search system is “built by its own users,” a phrase used in the Quartz article to describe the system. Quartz continued:
One of Blippex’s key selling points is that Kossatz and Baeck [the founders] are fanatical about privacy. Though Blippex constructs its search results on the basis of data gathered from its users, it does it in a way that’s anonymous and untraceable to any individual Blippex user. This obsession with privacy allows Blippex to rank pages—i.e., decide which pages to show people—with an algorithm that Google can’t match, because if Google gathered the data that Blippex does, users would find it unacceptably creepy.
Blippex does not track its users. One of the key technologies for the system is WebRTC. WebRTC is an open project that enables Web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple JavaScript APIs. If you don’t want to fool around with browser add ins, you can use Blippex like any other Web search system.
I ran a query for “enterprise search.” The results were interesting. I did not know that sold state drives were related to a search by a sheriff’s department or to Lenovo.
The order of the results is determined by the amount of time a user spends on a page. This is the “dwell time.”
Worth a look. A privacy centric European search system will have its supporters. The challenge, of course, is that Google dominates Web search in Europe. What is Google’s market share? 80 or 90 percent? Perhaps European regulators can adjust this situation?
Stephen E Arnold, October 17, 2014
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