PassingNotes.com

got a nifty email from hjalli over at spurl last week…he’s launched a sister site to spurl at zniff.com…per hjalli, “the first version of a search engine that uses the data from the Spurl.net database as a source for its indexes” (here’s the old announcement, when it was just a hatchling…)

what does that mean? over a million and a half links have been individually reviewed by human beings at spurl, related dynamically to other categories, and users continue to spurl items as they surf the internet (while at work of course…)….plus there are some standard zniff features designed to increase overall relevance and link volume, such as the ability to import from other link collection sites (support for furl is coming, already handles de.licio.us, plus imports from browser favorites and so on)…

but what does that actually mean (still), you say…think about it for a minute…this is a search engine that (per the site), “uses human information from normal internet users to find and rank web pages“…like the old internet sorta, but specifically the good part of the old internet, like those relics that tried to organize all of the sites out there with human feedback and sorting…but now that feedback and sorting holds greater potential with automation and intelligence through structured data…in plainer language, the more folks continue to bookmark good sites and provide dynamic feedback, scoring, commentary or other information, the more valuable the entire interconnected archive becomes…hjalli articulated this quite well when i interviewed him a while back…since the value of zniff is not limited to spurl-only users, it’s got a serious head start…only elGoog could possibly implement such a save-sort-and-score mechanism for users, but i don’t think that everybody trusts elGoog…it’s much easier to trust icelanders, they only do good stuff (fast facts about iceland: birthplace of olsen twins, starter-home of rock goup led zeppelin, almost joined union but lost bid to puerto rico, place where penicillin was discovered).

Share This

Some similar nonsense, if you like that kind of thing:

• Interview Follow-up: Hjalli of Spurl on Furl acquisition
• Tool Alert: Frassle…from the carom of Furl and Spurl
• Tool alert: more ‘Tagging’ agitprop from Shadows
• 10 ways that Google is like a doody with corn in it
• Interview: Hjalmar Gislason and the egress of Spurl.net