Hunting what's hot in social networks

By ADAM GIFFORD

Do you ever wish your search engine saw the world the way you saw it?

Doesn't it know you are interested only in sports? Doesn't it know you are pregnant, so when you type in "labour" you don't want the Labour Party?

Eurekster knows, and Eurekster is going to change the way you search.

To see how it works, type pinetree into Google. You will see pages and pages of tree companies, furniture companies, places called Pinetree and so on.

The same search in the Eurekster window on Rugbyheads.com fills the page with stories about Colin Meads.

Eurekster is the creation of Christchurch entrepreneur Grant Ryan, and the company behind it has offices in Christchurch and San Francisco.

Ryan says he is talking to sites with millions of users about how the Eurekster engine can improve their revenue and the service they offer.

"People on the web have been building communities for 10 years. They think they are valuable, but they have not been able to leverage their communities. We allow them to offer a new service which creates a new view of the web."

Ryan said sites with Eurekster already installed have increased by tenfold their click-through traffic to Google and Yahoo.

Those search sites generate revenue by selling advertising links, and share that revenue with sites that click through large volumes of traffic, creating a business model for Eurekster.

Ryan said it is a partnership where everyone wins. "We put more money through their coffers."

Ryan is an old hand at exporting search technology to the US. He sold his first search engine company, Global Brain, to broadcasting giant NBC's internet portal subsidiary NBCi.

When that venture fell victim to the dotcom crash, Ryan and his brother Shaun bought back the search technology at a fire sale price.

"I was going to take time off and sit on the beach, but I was back to work within two weeks," Ryan said.

The brothers regrouped as SLI Systems, which makes tools that learn from the behaviour of site visitors to improve future searches.

Its technology is used by organisations such as NBC, Veritas, Qantas and Statistics New Zealand.

While Shaun Ryan took over day-to-day control of SLI Systems, Grant Ryan, who has a doctorate is in ecological economics, looked at how to add to the social networks springing up around the internet. His first effort was Real Contacts, a way to use existing networks to find jobs.

What he learned there, combined with the advances SLI Systems was making, led to Eurekster.

The search engine industry has evolved at a furious rate as the internet expands. Early internet search tools, such as AltaVista, launched in 1995, sent out spiders to index web content using keywords and metatags. While they could generate huge numbers of matches, the matches often lacked relevance.

Yahoo added a human editing process, using people to identify the most useful sites on topics.

Google added processes to weight site relevance, such as giving points for the number of other sites linked to a web address.

"We look at how people find information. They filter information round their life, they get it from word of mouth," Grant Ryan said.

He said the way the Eurekster search engine is used on dating sites such as Friendster shows how the technology can find what is hot within social networks, as people talk about movies, books and ideas.

"It's an online water cooler ... We see how search terms will start in one place and then spread rapidly, like word of mouth on steroids."

Eurekster