New Search Engine Lets You ‘Get What You Think’
This direct-navigation, action-based search engine is based on how users actually search for information, and lets you to search backward and forward across URLs.
By Cara Oxendine
Traditional search engines often leave users feeling frustrated, looking through hundreds or thousands of results pages as if they were looking for a “needle in a haystack,” says Wilhelmina Stephenson, founder and CEO of ubExact.com, a new direct navigation, action-based Internet search engine launched in September 2008. Stephenson and her IT group researched how users search for information and designed the site around these results.
“We found that users search primarily for two reasons: They are either searching for specific things or specific locations, so we decided to provide [both] on our homepage,” says Stephenson. Thus the site lets you search by popular search categories such as business and education or metro service areas (MSAs), by which you can find, say, entertainment in Miami or fine dining in California.
There is also a conventional toolbar, but results can be filtered further by selecting one of four main actions: See it, Do it, Shop it, or Find it. As Stephenson explains, “We found that when people are searching either topic-specific or geographic, they are usually doing it because they want to see something, do something, buy something, or find something.” Direct navigation is also available, accessed by typing ubexactyourtopic.com or ubexactyourlocationmsa.com.
Unlike with traditional search engines, users have access to “deep links,” or “sites that hide behind a curtain that is not pulled [back] very often by algorithmic Web crawlers,” says Stephenson. And, using the site’s “search history” box means there is no need to hit the back button multiple times to get to a site you previously accessed. “Since we have a horizontal architecture, we developed code in the ubExact Web site that allows us to search in context, forward and backward across urls, which is something that has never been done,” Stephenson explains.
While ubExact doesn’t have the wealth of information of a Google or Yahoo just yet, the company launched with an index of the 15,000 most popular sites, and that doubled in only two months. The company adds Web sites weekly, and users contribute suggested sites daily. All submissions are human-edited to ensure organization and relevancy and to reduce spam, and are then indexed, categorized, and sorted according to MSA before posting.
Stephenson is pleased with this growth and noticeably optimistic about the future: “I expect that in six months the index will look nothing like it does now; it will be exponentially grander.”
