“Innovation in search has just begun”, Michael Arrington wrote in May 2008. He was right! The last 12 months have seen a lot of amazing tools come to market, after what seemed like a lull in search engine innovation during the previous 5-6 years. From steady innovations at Yahoo or Ask, to an ambitious attempted Google-killer from Cuil, to Wolfram’s Alpha, to Google’s own myriad innovations in search including Google Squared, many promising startups, and most recently, Microsoft’s Bing, the market seems humming again with search engine innovations.
Into this space of frenetic innovation in search, we introduce Zakta, a personal and social Web search engine. Zakta helps people find information better from the Web, by blending rich algorithmic Web search, with information organization, personalization, information sharing and collaboration.
In effect, Zakta takes a different approach to Web search by infusing deep personalization of search results, social media and social networking into a holistic solution for informational searches.
But, does the world need another Web search engine?
The Web has become a really big place, and there is an ever-present need for good search tools to harness all the information coming online:
- The amount of content online is growing explosively, estimated at a trillion pages of information and growing steeply every day.
- Social media has fundamentally shifted the equation as user-created content heralded the so-called Web 2.0 phenomenon, bringing even more content online faster than ever before.
- Multimedia, local information, content in different languages, specialized databases and repositories all add to the staggering diversity of content now available online.
- The social networking phenomenon has become very entrenched and has promoted even more content creation and sharing in networks like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others.
The world might not need one more generic me-too Web search engine, but what these trends says to me is that there is room for innovative search tools that will solve specific needs.That is why the market today is alive with many investments in search startups as well as continued innovations from the entrenched players.
So, what specific need does Zakta solve?
People have two kinds of experiences with Web search today.
With the first kind, they get instant gratification for their queries. For example, look for a company name like Cisco, and you get its Web site link as the first hit quite often, and these days, you even get instant access to contact information and possibly even other relevant information stock quotes or a map right away.
With the second kind, there’s a good chance people will spend a lot of time trying to get what they were looking for, and possibly get quite frustrated with the search effort. For example, look for information on a topic like college financial aid, or the voip service options for small business, or your next vacation destination and you’ll more than likely be sifting through lots of results, of probably more than one query, trying to get what you want.
Search industry experts know of this phenomenon.
- Transactional searches, as the first class of searches are sometimes called, lend themselves to a very specific answer, and given the wealth of information available online, a sophisticated enough engine can find the answer. For simplicity, I’ve combined factual searches (queries to find a specific fact like the 32nd US president) and navigational searches (queries to find a specific web site like singapore airlines) into this group, because they lend themselves to a very specific answer.
- Informational searches, as the second class of searches are sometimes called, do not lend themselves to a very specific answer. Here, the wealth of information on the Web can actually contribute to information overload, especially given that the information is usually not organized for easy consumption. It also doesn’t help that today’s search tools don’t go very far in supporting the processes that users take to find the information they want.
Zakta is focused on solving the problem with informational searches.
How does Zakta help with informational searches?
I believe that there are many things missing in today’s approach to search, that contribute to the informational search problem:
- Information on the Web is disorganized, and this tends to make it more complex for a person to find easily what they need.
- Searching for information is a process, and today’s tools do not support the process. For the most part, the search results page tends to be read-only (exceptions are there, of course) and leaves all the “sifting” to be done within a person’s mind or using outside tools like bookmarking, text notes, emails, post-its etc.
- Search engines haven’t traditionally involved the people they serve, so they are unable to leverage knowledge that people have to improve the searching process to their specific needs, and they are unable to let people leverage knowledge from others they trust
With this understanding, we designed Zakta to help a person with their informational searches in layers:
- Start with organized search results
- Explore the topic of your query with related topics and subtopics
- Own and control the search process and results completely
- Save what you’ve found and save time when you get back
- Share your knowledge and findings in the form of Zakta Guides
- Collaborate with people you trust
- Connect and stay informed
By putting the searcher and people they trust into the searching mix, Zakta makes a noteworthy departure from traditional Web search engine design.
I’ll be sharing more information on each of these benefits in future blog posts.
What is the status of Zakta?
Zakta is now in public beta, having gone through 22-months of open development with user input since August 2007. We are committed to the principle of continuous improvement, and have been making steady improvements to the capabilities as well as user experience.
We want Zakta to be extremely useful for your informational searches. Our intention is to serve lots of very happy users with our system.
Early user feedback indicates that people like what they see with Zakta, but also indicate that there’s more room for simplifying our interface. We’ve been hard at work to listen and adapt as fast as we can.
And to this end, we value your feedback greatly. So please take Zakta for a spin and let us know.
The people behind Zakta
Zakta is a labor of love and passion for me. I am Sundar Kadayam, and am Founder and CEO of Zakta. Prior to Zakta, I was co-founder and CTO at Intelliseek and then at Nielsen BuzzMetrics.
I’m joined in this effort by some amazing people who I respect dearly.
Mark Reed, CTO of Zakta, is a brilliant software architect with a rich track record of building and supporting large scale, commercially successful systems. His background in distributed systems, search engines, text analytics, social media and databases provide the relevant base of knowledge upon which Zakta is built.
Mahendra Vora, serial entrepreneur and owner of many companies, and my partner and co-founder from Intelliseek is a partner and Chairman of Zakta, and continues to be a mentor on a wide range of topics.
I also have the good fortune of having the advice and support of many industry veterans, who I’ll call out in future blog posts.
Zakta is a TINY company, operated out of Cincinnati, Ohio, my home of over 20 years.
BTW: The name “Zakta” is derived from the word “Exactly”!
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