AfterVote is a Social Search Engine which launched in early 2007. Its emphasis on passive voting and unique widgets per search result has set it apart. AfterVote is also a Meta Search Engine. It searches Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

AfterVote was previously known as Younanimous, but opted for a name change due to users struggling to remember it, and poor ability to respell it. On the AfterVote blog, they say that the Younanimous logo is still a favorite, and felt that it was much more 'clever and catchy' than AfterVote

AfterVote is a mid sized search engine at the moment, with reports of 5500 peak searches per hour. The founders believe that the unique concepts of the engine, as well as its unique method of voting will set it apart.

Social Searching

Social search began to emerge between 2004 and 2005. On January 21, 2004 Eurekster was referred to as personalized social search <ref name=EureksterSEW>Sullivan, Danny. Eurekster Launches Personalized Social Search. Search Engine Watch. January 21, 2004.</ref>. On June 28, 2005 Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo referred to the Yahoo! MyWeb product as 'social search'. On October 26, 2005 Pete Cashmore applied the term 'social search' to Wink.

And despite the current awareness, the concept of social search can be considered to derive from Google's PageRank algorithm, which assigns importance to Web pages based on analysis of the link structure of the web, because PageRank is relying on the collective judgement of webmasters linking to other content on the web. Links, in essence, are positive votes by the webmaster community for their favorite sites.

Social search as it's evolving today incorporates both automated software as well as human judgments about the nature of web content.

Social search is information retrieval, wayfinding tools informed by human judgment. It's about people helping people find stuff. Social search experiences revolve around the outcome of collaborative harvesting, directory building, tagging, social ranking, Question & Answers services, Shared bookmarks and Web pages. Social Search is surfacing the tail and already channeling significant amounts of traffic around. Information retrieval is reaching another inflexion point. There is a shift taking place from Search engines having the power to search users getting empowered, from the head to the tail, from a "few-to-many" to a "many-to-many" publishing model. Social search is changing the rules, shifting power to the people. Another way to think of it is Social Search is the 3rd big evolution of the search business after i) algorithmic search, ii) paid search models, and now iii) Social Search. Web 2.0 trends converge toward social search: social networking, consumer generated media, open platforms and syndication models, new user interaction models.
To paraphrase Microsoft's Ramez Naam, it's like every human being is a neuron, and humanity as a whole is one giant brain, smarter as a connected whole. If you can increase the ability of humans to communicate with each other, you make the whole planet smarter.

As articulated by Chris Sherman, social search is information retrieval, way finding tools informed by human judgment. Social search is people helping people find stuff using plain-language questions and answers, collaborative content harvesting, directory building, voting and ranking, sharing, tagging, commenting on bookmarks, Web pages, news, images, videos and podcasts.

Software

AfterVote assumably uses custom software, written in ASP.net- The site is also dependent on AJAX. Currently there is no Safari support. The founders said in a earlier blog post that the service runs on 5 separate servers in a private rack in the EV1Servers Datacenter.

Company

AfterVote, Inc is a company based in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA. It has 3 founders and 15 employees. It is self funded at the moment, however has stated they are 'always listening' to offers from VC firms.

Aftervote Technology

The following is taken from the AfterVote 'About' Page:
Great... Another search engine.

Boy do we hear ya! And what makes us think that this has any chance of being better than the all-mighty search gods Google, Yahoo and MSN? Its easy actually. AfterVote(Younanimous) is a new twist on a old idea. For years now, sites have existed as "meta search engines" which would search Google, Yahoo and MSN. The problem with these search engines is that they were unbearably slow, as they had to query Google, Yahoo, and MSN before they had anything to display.

Enter AfterVote(Younanimous): With an AJAX backbone, YOU Search Google, MSN, and Yahoo and let us know what you found and then we rank them for you, while providing additional detail about each result such as Alexa ranking, Google Pagerank, domain age and much more.

So what? It's a fast meta search engine. Who cares? Wait, there's more... Not only are we a meta search engine, but we also have a passive voting system in place. Today, everyone is familiar with sites like Digg and Shoutwire. These sites let the users decide what is a good story, and what's not. We are applying this same principle to search results without having to go through all that work of clicking buttons to vote for a site's "coolness". Here's an example. You do a search for "Social Search Engine" and you click the first result. It's not what you were looking for at all, and is therefore not a useful result for your query. You press the back button and try result #2. Voila! You found exactly what you are looking for. But it's more than that. AfterVote(Younanimous) is analyzing these results and has cast a vote for you automatically, saying that result #1 wasn't what you wanted, but #2 was. If you do however find a awesome site, you can manually vote for it as well.

Ever find sites that never have the info you want, but are always at the top of the serps? Yes, we are looking at you Experts-Exchange.com... Well, now you can blacklist pages or entire domains from showing up in your listings, No more crap! And say goodbye to spam. With a "Spam!" Tag, you can help eliminate bogus results from the serps one spam site at a time.

Don't take our word for it, try this. Do a Google, MSN, or Yahoo search for a common spammer term. Viagra would be a good test. Look at how on these engines, spam just takes up all the spots. Now try it on AfterVote. You will be hard pressed to find anything unofficial and that's why AfterVote works.

Another cool thing is that you don't need an account to enjoy all the awesomeness of AfterVote. It's all stored in a cookie! Of course, you can create one if you want to and share your settings at work and gramma's house, but it's totally up to you!

But there's more! Amazing coolness awaits as you can develop your own widgets and algorithms based upon your searches! Do you value Alexa rank more than life itself? Now you can have the sites with the highest Alexa rank at the top! What about a combination of Google Pagerank and Alexa? That works also! Domain age? Yep. Del.icio.us links? Yep. Digg homepaged? Yep. You name it, you can have it.

And finally, We know we don't even 'come close' to being as cool as Google. Fact is, we wouldn't exist without the fantastic work of Google, MSN, and Yahoo. So props to you big companies who have made the web what it is. We salute you!

External links

[2185], Aftervote Main page

[2186], Aftervote Blog