Decipho: Social/Personalized Search Built on Ask API
Decipho creator Steve wrote me recently to introduce his start up, which apparently runs on top of Ask's web search API.

If you're not a registered user you have the tabbed options including General, Shop/Services, and Research/Info (very become).

Once you're registered you can upload your bookmarks, categorize results, and vote for results on your searches. Votes affect the color of results.

Steve is 23 and worked previously at ranking Hawaii travel sites high in Google and Yahoo. He's built all this with no funding at all.

Steve here are my questions for you:

Q) What is your overall vision for Decipho?
The overall vision of Decipho is to make it easier to filter search results. I wanted it to be possible to do a search and automatically know what the content is about for that particular website without viewing it.

The key to making this work was by having enough information about the voting patterns for a particular website so that our users can make the best decision of whether they want to view the site or not. This is why I think the Search Analysis link is so important because it will allow our users to see what other keywords this website was categorized for by our users and break it down in percentages.

Q) Are you seeking a mainstream audience or a niche audience? Why?
Decipho is seeking a mainstream audience and the niche audience. The key in building Decipho was to make it useful for users who don't want to sign up for an account but with the option of having more features (The "My Results" section) if you did sign up so that we can get the novice and expert users to find Decipho useful.

Q) How do you think that rewarding people for their input will affect that input?
I don't think it will. I know that some people will try to spam Decipho with rankings that shouldn't count but I feel that the community will work itself out. There is a way to challenge a website's rating by clicking on a link next to the search result if our users think the rating is incorrect.

Q) What/who are your search engine influences?
Of course it has to be Google. I had some other websites that I tried to get it ranked on Google and became fascinated by how Google works that I tried to break it down to see how it works. I started to find ways on how I can improve search that I decided to build my own and was lucky enough that Ask.com decided to partner with us.

Q) What was your development language/s and process for Decipho?
We used PHP and some other simple programming languages to manipulate the XML feed.

And here's help for any Ask API users out there: Unofficial documentation of Ask's Web Search API.

Ask knows. So does Google. It's all about distribution ;)
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |