discover what’s popular on the web right now a conversational approach to... · discover what’s...

Discover what’s popular on the web right now

www.Wowd.com

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Where would you go to find the most popular & freshest information on the web? Google? Yahoo? Maybe Bing? This is not the problem that they solve Wowd is a real-time discovery & search engine, and this is exactly what it does

Old school: Reference search


This covers Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc -- this is what we call reference search UX: Looking through documents for topics you already know about What’s indexed, and how it’s ranked: Links between documents drive crawlers and ranking The web has changed! There’s a new layer of information out there, conversational in nature

New school: Topics in conversations

User experience starts with discovery…


No longer documents, but people engaging in conversations Public, global, high-velocity, high-volume: REAL-TIME! User experience starts with discovery

Discover in real-time


This is the Wowd Hot List, which shows new, popular pages in real-time Updates live, before your eyes, as you can see here Page content changes and pages are nominated by Wowd users Like a top-20 list for the entire web

Discover in real-time


Search in real-time


If you want to do a deep-dive on one particular result [Halloween] Get real-time results from the ENTIRE web Scan down results, make two key points:

All results shown are w/in a few minutes Results are pulled from the entire web, not a handful of target sites

Search for what’s popular...

… andshare it


If you want to do a deep-dive on one particular result [Photoshop tutorials] Get popular results from the ENTIRE web Key point about results:

Ranked according to popularity to real people (readers, not publishers)

How does this work?

Hint: It requires no crawlers and no servers &

puts users in control


A distributed cloud architecture


People download the Wowd browser application Makes a distributed cloud -- fantastically scalable 100s of M of computers, trillions of data items Like Skype for discovery and search Like BitTorrent in that the more people that join, the faster it gets

Visiting a public page nominates it


Visiting a public page nominates that page for indexing No content from user’s machine shared, no trace of behavior in the cloud

Indexing done by another computer

The cloud indexes public pages


Not your Dad’s P2P network Not for sharing information from your own computer It’s a system for nominating and indexing publicly available pages

The index is stored in the cloud


Data is stored distributed around the network: no centralized database So what does this achieve? A democracy of readers, voting for pages (not a democracy of publishers) How the hell can we, a startup, do this? The power of many. Scales to millions of people and trillions of web pages -- attention data, not link data

Links are the fossil record of the web

-- John Battelle


We couldn’t agree more It’s about human attention, not page linking

• Get results popular with real people

• Find the freshest pages across the entire web

• Hot topics you wouldn’t think to search for

The best way to engage the real-time web


These capabilities come from our core principles Discovery is central to UX True ranking over historical and recent data, from the whole web Ranking based on popularity to real people

Web 2.0 Summit Preview

www.Wowd.com

Launching Public Beta, Today!


Check out the Hot List and search results today They reflect the Web 2.0 crowd’s interests!

discover what’s popular on the web right now a conversational approach to... · discover what’s...

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