'Social Search Engine' Claims Better Results

The creators of Wikipedia promised to shake up the search industry with an open source search engine project announced in July that's still in development. But upstart EarthFrisk.org thinks it's gone one better with today's launch of what it calls the first "Meta-Social-Hybrid Search Engine." Rather than compete directly with search giants like Google and Yahoo, EarthFrisk leverages those results and adds a community rating system for which it's applied for a patent. EarthFrisk delivers what it says are the best search results from Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and Clusty (itself a meta-search engine that combines results from different search engines) and filters out spam. In a brief test of several topics (Wii, Hybrid Cars, John Edwards), EarthFrisk gave a consistently clean set of relevant results. Users can rate the results, which are then assigned a color value (called a CV rating) like a traffic light, green considered the top rating. "Over time we expect the community aspect to overshadow the best results we're generating now," Michael Lodispoto, managing member of EarthFrisk.org, told InternetNews.com. "Search results are based on links, but we're going to go beyond that." EarthFrisk also features Google's AdSense text ads in the right column of the results page. Eventually, Lodispoto said EarthFrisk plans to sell its own ad network in that right column. He said the community effort behind EarthFrisk started only six months ago as an effort to improve on what Google offers. There are engineers and developers involved in EarthFrisk in the U.S. including New York, where it is based, plus Japan and Brazil. On the social network side, EarthFrisk.Org said it has direct interfaces with Digg, Wikipedia and other major sites as well as search engines. Community ratings can be seen by clicking on a discuss/info/vote button next to all search engine results.