Blippex for a Different Kind of Search
October 17, 2013
Since Google came to dominate the internet search landscape, many rivals have launched. Some have found varying degrees of success, but none have come close to overtaking the master. Now, blogger Christopher Mims believes he may have found a contender in Blippex; “This Is the First Interesting Search Engine Since Google,” Quartz declares. We also found Blippex interesting.
Mims notes that, unlike most competitors, Blippex is not trying to reinvent the Googly wheel. Its approach is different. Instead of indexing the web in general, Blippex looks only at pages its users have visited. The article explains:
“Blippex’s algorithm, called DwellRank, decides relevance based on how long users spend on a site and how many times Blippex users have visited it. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have, independently of the Blippex team, established that the amount of time someone spends on a web page or document is, not surprisingly, a pretty good measure of how important and relevant it is (pdf). Blippex gets this information by having you download a plugin for your web browser. This plugin measures how long you spend on each site and sends the information to Blippex, anonymized—that is, stripped of any information that could identify you.”
Isn’t this approach a bit limiting? For now, yes, but the makers of Blippex liken the young site to Wikipedia, which became much more effective as users contributed information. Currently, says Mims, the site’s user base is mostly geeky early adopters, so it is a good place to go for programming questions. It is also adequate for recent events, he writes, but is not the place for more obscure searches. With the limitations, why bother? Well, Blippex’s “fanatical” commitment to privacy is one reason; like DuckDuckGo, the site does not track its users. They even made their browser plugin open source, so folks can verify that it is not collecting private information. And, of course, the results will get better as more people install that plugin.
There remains one question—how will Blippex make money on this ad-free site? If co-founders Max Kossatz and Gerald Bäck have figured that out yet, they don’t seem to be sharing the answer. The company, based in Austria, launched last July.
Cynthia Murrell, October 17, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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