It’s been only a few days from the launch of Volunia in its testing phase, the new search engine by Massimo Marchiori. I had the opportunity to be registered as a Power User, so after a few days of using it it's time for a little review.

Web and the Community

Volunia is not only a search engine, its more like a hybrid between a search engine and a social network. The motto is "Seek & Meet", which means that it brings some new concepts to searching and using the web.

It reminds me of real life; imagine when you go to a square in the City Centre, there's lot of people and you can ask questions or informations to anyone, the same happens in Volunia, each website is a public place where you can meet other Volunia users and ask questions (means chatting) to them. Eg. while surfing the Internet Movie Database imdb.com, which is a trending map right now, I saw someone asking about a good thriller movie.

Check it out the video

Intuitive Visual maps

These are SimCity like maps which make really easy searching through a website, you can take a glance of the website and see what are its main sections. You can also browse the grid maps, which are the classical representation of folders and sub-folders, this is useful if you're using a smartphone.

Check it out the video.

Searching the Web

Searching the web is more or less the same as Google, the difference is that every link in the search results has two icons, one for its visual map while the other let you see how many people are on the website.

Searching the web was one of my mayor expectation. It's a long time that I am not satisfied with Google's results. I use the web mainly to find solutions, when I started using Google in the years 1999/2000 I could get them quickly, thanks to the fact that Google indexed the whole USENET. That's not the case any more, using Google to search technical solutions its a pain. Sure, the USENET times are gone so we have to find solutions in a different way, that's why websites like StackOverflow are successful.

About Volunia I cannot say anything yet, right now searching is a little bit disappointing, but they explained to the Power Users that they started with a relatively small part of the web in their index, so they can see the impact on their architecture. It will get better and better with time as their architecture is modular and scalable, which means basically that they need to add machines.

Check it out the video

Find media content in a website

In the interface there is a media button which enables the search for different media, like images, videos, documents, but this search is limited to the website that you're visiting, not the whole web as Google.

Check it out the video

Firefox Add-on

There is also an Add-on for Firefox which let you browse the website in an iframe with Volunia's features still present around it.

This is actually not working very well, as most sites don't let to be visited inside iframes, among them Twitter, Facebook or Google. Probably a classical toolbar would have been a better choice.

Gadgets to put on your website

I saw in my profile settings that they're many gadgets to put on my website: social buttons, integration of the visual map and many others. I'll probably try them out on this blog in the near future.

Conclusions

Volunia adds new concepts and ideas about the web, also it adds the "Social" concept to the search engine. Also Google is doing it, with its +1 and G+ but I prefer the Volunia way, it feels closest to real life.