Zakta Guides: A Social Media Tool to Organize the Web
Have you searched for in-depth information on the Web lately only to get back results that were mostly sales pitches, regurgitations of a single article that wasn’t very informative in the first place, woefully out-of-date pages, or bait-and-switch sites that didn’t even mention your search term? Is there any hope of getting useful and trusted resources for what you are searching for?
Brian Solis wrote about the rapid evolution of search (also here) citing the flurry of activity in the search industry around such capabilities as real-time search, social search and semantic search. In my personal opinion, one big issue that hasn’t received much attention is the one I raise above – what is going to help people with their searches for in-depth information on the Web?
Zakta, our personal and social Web search engine, offers a way that makes Web searching useful, purposeful and fun. As I’ve written before, Zakta helps with these deeper informational searches, by presenting organized information for your search queries, enabling you to personalize the results, save them for later use and even share the search results you’ve found useful with friends, family, workgroups and the world.
A few weeks ago, Matt Hurst wrote on his Datamining blog that Zakta was a new way to organize Web knowledge and might be part of a set of emerging tools for what he calls “web gardening“. I wanted to elaborate on this part of Zakta, by introducing Zakta Guides, the social media tool in Zakta that enables organization of resources from the Web on any topic, and all the benefits it brings to people everywhere and to the authors of Guides in particular.
On Zakta, no matter what topic you are searching on, you can collect the best Web sites, news articles, blog posts, products, companies, services, videos, images, whatever is relevant and useful for your search, and organize and share it in the form of a Guide with others. When other users look for similar information, Zakta presents your Guide (or other matching Guides created by other Zakta users) in their search results. i.e. Others can benefit from the results of your searching effort, and begin their search with what you have found useful.
In turn, other users can vote and recommend your Guide, share it with others, and even suggest new resources to add to your Guide, so you and everyone else can benefit from what others have discovered. Users who like certain Guides can subscribe to them so they can stay on top of updates and additional search results. A really powerful capability in Zakta is that you can even invite other people you trust – friends, family members, co-workers, and associates – to collaborate with you and add to and edit your Guide. In this way, a Zakta Guide enables the best information from the Web to be organized in one place for a given topic.
See these interesting Zakta Guides that people have created so far.
There are Guides on a diverse range of subjects such as these:
- Niagara Falls
- Lucille Ball
- U.S. political satirists from the 1950s-today
- Financial Aid 101 (part of a collection of Zakta Guides on College Planning Made Easy!)
- Finding a Job in an Economic Downturn
- Chess
- Ivory Soap Advertising History
- Gay Marriage in the United States
When you organize and share the best resources from the Web on a topic you are interested in, you make it easy for others to search on that topic. Likewise, you benefit from what others have shared. Imagine if everyone decided to share what they’ve found useful from their searches on topics they know about using Guides! Just how much more useful the search experience can be for everyone! Jason Falls mused about the game changing possibilities this kind of approach to getting curated search results in his recent post on Zakta. And Jason was right in arguing that this will require that people come to Zakta.
I can cite three reasons why Zakta can be very useful to you:
- Help yourself with a personalized searching experience that saves you time with your deeper searches for information. Who wouldn’t want to save time in this ever-demanding world we live in!
- Help others by sharing what you know or have found. You will likewise benefit from others doing the same. This is a win-win proposition coming from a search framework that lets people help each other!
- You can offer more value to your current visitors, reach more searchers on the Web, and engage your followers better in social networks! This is a big, practical benefit for you, and here’s how Zakta enables this:
- Zakta Guides can be linked from your blog, Web site, or social network page, to offer additional information to new and recurring visitors alike.
- Here’s the big kicker - If your Guides are good, it will be automatically indexed by other popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others – this means that users searching on the Web using these popular search engines for matching topics will find your Guides in the search engine results page, and benefit from your Guides.
By combining a personalized search engine with a social media tool in the form of Zakta Guides, and a social network to let you connect with people you trust, Zakta makes it possible for people to make a difference in the quality of the search experience for themselves and everyone else. The overarching benefit for the Web as a whole is that Zakta can help organize the chaos of the Web, one topic at a time!
I invite you to dig deeper into Zakta and experience these benefits for yourself. As always, we’d love to hear feedback and what we can do to make Zakta better for you.
What is Social Search?
It is hot! So hot that Google legitimized it with their recent update. Buzz is building on social search like never before, as this handy trend graph from BlogPulse indicates:
But what is social search?
According to different industry voices, social search …
“… involves combining social graph information with pure algorithmic search results.“
“… combines traditional algorithm-driven technology with online community filtering.“
“… helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle.“
“… is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment.“
These definitions are quite broad and varying, and the result is that so many solutions have come under the banner of “social search”. However, one thing common across these diverse set of tools and services is this: they’ve all used collective intelligence (wisdom of the crowds, if you will) in some way to improve what they present to users in the search process.
- In the early days of the Internet, DirectHit (later acquired by Ask Jeeves) watched which links users clicked through more for a given search and used that data for dynamically ranking search results based on their popularity with the community of users.
- Amazon has been a pioneer in the space of using social/community data to improve the searches for users on Amazon.com – much has been written about their recommendation engine!
- Intelliseek’s ProFusion.com engine ( a product I helped design) used an adaptive search mechanism (community usage driven) to determine what are the best sources to pick for a given query in a distributed / federated search environment.
- Wikia Search used the Wikipedia model of direct, swarm-editing of search result pages for different queries. i.e. Wikia Search users could interactively change the results on any result page, and impact what other users saw directly.
- In reality, Google has always been a social search engine, in a couple of ways. They’ve always tracked what people have liked through who / what they hyperlink to – a core to their famed PageRank algorithm. In the recent years, they’ve also included user and community contributions (in the form of social media) into their search results, with content from Wikipedia and the blogosphere impacting search results in a noticeable way.
- Yahoo has tried integration of Delicious (their social bookmarking system) into the search results.
- Presently, the buzz is all about including social network data and data from popular social tools like Twitter into the search results. Bing did it. Now Google is doing it too!
My company, Zakta, is also a recent entrant in “social search”, and we refer to Zakta as a personal and social Web search engine. Our aim is to improve informational searches on the Web.What prompted me to write this post was the recent Google announcement on social search. Our small community of users felt that Google was encroaching on Zakta’s turf, and I thought I should help clarify where Zakta fits.
First, Zakta has no turf – Google dominates all 
Second, we are trying to add value to the informational search experience of users through a comprehensive solution framework, so we don’t get into feature battles with giants that we don’t have a chance of surviving (as it is, I’ve been called “Nuts!” to start Zakta at this time, and having my tiny company enter into a feature race with the giants should surely bring me the label “Stupid” too – something I’d very much like to avoid!).
On the X-axis, I plot the Personal (focus is on the individual) versus Communal (focus is on the community as a whole) continuum. On the Y-axis, I plot the nature of information that users interact with, in terms of whether it is Disorganized (focus has been on mere collection of information) versus Organized (focus is on curation of digital information).
Using this framework, I’ve mapped a handful of social search services and tools that I’m somewhat familiar with. So, admittedly, both this framework and my characterization of these services in this framework are based on my personal viewpoint. I’d welcome comments for improvement, or other viewpoints. I hope you find this framework a useful tool to make sense of what is happening with this growing space that is simply called “social search”.
Now I can put Zakta into this context. As portrayed in this framework, Zakta is a personal Web search engine because it provides tools to deliver a personal search engine experience that puts the searcher in control.
Zakta is also a social Web search engine in many distinct ways:
- It enables a searcher to collaborate with people they trust to find, collect, organize and share information on topics of interest
- It enables a searcher to connect to others they trust and discover information relevant to their interests from the recommendations made by their trust-network
- It enables a searcher to benefit from the contributions of the community of Web users in the form of published Zakta Guides on topics of interest
- It enables a searcher to gain from the ongoing relevance ranking improvements that happen behind the scenes that take into account the signals of recommendation expressed by not only the user’s trust-network, but also the community as a whole not just on Zakta, but elsewhere on the Web
As you can see, Zakta is not as much about finding what your social network has been saying. Rather it is all about empowering you personally and helping you benefit from your trusted network as well as the community at large to improve your own Web search experience and discover useful information on an ongoing basis on topics of your interest.
As always, I’d love to get your feedback!
Introducing Zakta
“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”!
