French search engine bases search engine results on user contributions.

By Lars Våge, Internetbrus

Web 2.0 is the topic of the day. It is hard to say exactly what it is. However, one point seems to be to make use of the knowledge of Internet users.

Yoono is a new French search engine that calls itself a “social search engine” and describes itself as “the new search 2.0″.

Yoono does not work as a regular searh engine. Instead of searching for keywords, you fill in a Web address (URL) in the search form in order to generate a list of similar web sites.

Apart form web sites, the search result list also includes links to experts — Yoonoo-users that has special competences in a particular area. The more people who subscribe to a specific topic expert, the more credibilty does that expert gain. High ranking experts will get higher rankings in the results.

Yoono also draws attention to web sites that have been previously recommended by users of Yoono. The hits are ranked by popularity. According to Yoono’s help sections, Yoono will only index web sites bookmarked by users, and it is their “votes” that is used to determine the ranking.

Apart from searching Yoono offers a powerful tool for the handling and sharing of bookmarks.

If you would like to become an active Yoono-user, contributing as an expert, you should download the Firefox plug in – a side bar that displays Yoono results when you are searching using Google or Yahoo!

At the Yoono web site there is also a developers’ blog and a discussion forum for Yoono users.

[Note: After testing the Yoono Firefox extension on our Mac we have found that:

• On a Mac you can't choose to make some bookmarks private.
• If you use Yoono on two different computers, it will force you to keep the same set of bookmarks on both computers.
• You can't access the online bookmarks from a computer that doesn't have the extension installed.

The editors.]

This article was originally published in Internetbrus, a Swedish blog on search engines and Internet searching that has been online since early 2001. It is written for both searchers and educators.