Volunia Category Archive

Volunia: A First Look

Volunia, a new search engine from Massimo Marchiori in Italy, was announced several months ago and promised a new kind of searching. In beta, its tag line is "Seek & Meet" emphasizing the social aspects of the search engine. I was able to sign up as an early "power user" (i.e. beta tester), and yesterday I finally was able to log in and try the new search engine. Plenty of others have written about it from SearchEngineLand to Forbes. So I thought I'd let people who do not have an account take a first view at how it looks. Here is my (edited) screencast of my first attempt using it for a navigational query and a couple subject searches. I have certainly not explored all the new features and have not yet linked it to any of my social networks, but at first glance, Volunia has

• a decent size database which is not yet as large or broad as Google or Bing (no big surprise there)
• features a very busy screen with many links to social searching
• shows which other Volunia users have viewed some pages
• does not yet appear to support phrase searching, cache links, or an advanced search page
• has many language limits
• has a visual map and grid map view of results

Volunia's welcome message to its beta users includes the following: "Welcome to Volunia! We are as excited as you are to see how this new ideas will take place, and change the landscape of the web. . . . Please remember we are a startup so this is just the beginning: we have started with a relatively small part of the web in our index, so to see the impact on our architecture. Therefore, only the most important web sites are now present. In the future, once we have assimilated your feedback, we will expand the search engine and let it grow so to cover a bigger part of the web: our architecture is modular and scalable so we will just need to add machines. Meanwhile, if you want you can still add your web site, even if not in our index, by using the corresponding option on your profile, taking control and building your own map. You can also edit the map of your site if already

Watch the screencast on YouTube