PreFound Tag Search Engine (very) Early Adopters Are Educators, Researchers
I just got off the phone with Steve Mansfield, co-founder of PreFound.com, a newly-launched community search engine that enables its users to tag and organize sites for others to search.

Steve's from my neck of the woods, over there in Silicon Holler (his term), Lexington, Kentucky. Check out the PreFound blog here (official url coming soon... they're new dang it).

Why tag search?

"We're making the tagging and community effort more accessible to the everyday user."

I think this is accurate - their front page features the most recent "PFfinders," some with pics, and you don't see a single mention of the word "tag" on their site at all. Instead it's "Share what you've found with others. We'll show you how."

There are also pictures of the community scrolling beneath the search box.

Who's using this?

"Our strongest early adopters include educators - college professors, high school teachers and hardcore researchers."

Steve noted that these folks have become PreFind users only in the last few days and so are a bit statistically insignificant. He has a scrolling ticker on his desktop telling him who the most recent community members are. I found it quite interesting though, and wondered if there's a stronger demand in the academic and research community for social search?

How are you fighting spam?

"The only way you can upload tags is through our pffinder tagging tool, plus we have human editors. Plus you can't rank your own stuff - we have software to make sure you're not coming at it obliquely."

In addition to a crew of human editors analyzing filtered submissions they have user ratings, so that searchers can rate individuals' tags.

My big question for tags always comes back to spam. I think tags are useful in this online world of unstructured data. I'm not 100% certain that what they have in place would scale to protect against a concerted spamming effort, but that's not a problem they have right now. For now what they have in place will keep the pests out.

Why go so broad instead of picking a vertical?

"We wanted to make tagging universal to anyone who wanted to be a part. We think algorithmic search will become overwhelming and that non-algorithmic search should be a major part of information retrieval on the web."

Can human editors scale if PreFinder blows up?

"We're going to continue to enhance filtering software so editors do less and less, plus bring in active community members to make them editors."

I noted that a natural fit for PreFind is MySpace, where there's a built in community and asked if they're building to be an acquisition target.

"Once we've shown what we can do we will be looking at strategic partnerships with community sites."

Why PreFind over, say, Del.cio.us? (Steve noted that he's an avid Del.cio.us user)

"Delicious is not search centric - you have to commit time to figure out how to use it and what it's good for. For your everyday average users there's not much good to it. We're making tags more accessible to the average user."

Some people aren't too impressed with PreFound: Is Every New Search Engine Just a "Feature"?

Others aren't unimpressed: PreFound.com Lets Others Search For You

What do you think?
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |