Jookster is no joke

Submitted by acohill on Wed, 12/07/2005 - 08:51

A wave of new search engines are coming. The business theory behind them is that peeling off just a small piece of Google's massive market domination is good money. Also driving things is the growing realization that Google has not done a darn thing to improve their search engine since they rolled it out (not as far as I can tell, anyway), making the company vulnerable to anyone who can provide a better mousetrap.

Jookster seems to do a much better job of weeding out irrelevant and spam-style sites from results, based on a very unscientific test of a few queries. On Google, I would get hundreds or thousands of results. Jookster was returned (typically) fifty or less results that were highly relevant.

The logo explains the name--the company is using a variant of the native American jokester Kokopelli, and part of the joke may be adding the extra 'o' like Google. So if nothing else, these folks have a sense of humor.

Jookster adds an interesting but unproven twist on searching by allowing you to have a network of friends/associates that share a set of keywords and searches. By letting the company share your searches with your "network," the quality of the results goes up.

So Jookster is combining search with social networks. It's an interesting idea, but entirely unproven. As always, I'm very leery of giving away too much personal information to these companies, but we have a whole generation of younger people who think nothing of putting everything about themselves on the network, with Facebook an example of the trend. According to TechCrunch, an astounding 85% of college students use the service.

We may be entering an age when there is no privacy, and where most people think that is fine.